15 Facts About David Cockrum

1.

David Emmett Cockrum was an American comics artist known for his co-creation of the new X-Men characters Nightcrawler, Storm, Colossus, and Mystique, as well as the antiheroine Black Cat.

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2.

David Cockrum was a prolific and inventive costume designer who updated the uniforms of the Legion of Super-Heroes.

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3.

David Cockrum did the same for the new X-Men and many of their antagonists in the 1970s and early 1980s.

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4.

David Cockrum's father was a lieutenant colonel of the United States Air Force, resulting in the Cockrums frequently transporting their household from one city to another for years.

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5.

David Cockrum discovered comic books at a young age; an early favorite was Fawcett's Captain Marvel, especially Mac Raboy's Captain Marvel Jr.

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6.

David Cockrum was then hired as an assistant inker to Murphy Anderson, who was inking various titles featuring Superman and Superboy for DC Comics.

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7.

David Cockrum eventually left DC and the Legion in a dispute involving the return of his original artwork from that issue.

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8.

Storm and Nightcrawler were directly based on characters which David Cockrum had intended to introduce into the Legion of Super-Heroes storyline had he remained on the title.

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9.

David Cockrum's penciled interiors on those first few issues of the "new" X-Men were dark and appealingly dramatic.

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10.

David Cockrum gave those first few issues of X-Men a sumptuous, late-'70s cinema style that separated the book from the rest of Marvel's line, and superhero comics in general.

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11.

Uncanny X-Men really felt new and different, almost right away, and David Cockrum's art was a tremendous part of that.

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12.

Two unpublished fill-in issues that David Cockrum pencilled in the early 1990s for X-Men and New Mutants respectively were released together posthumously as the one-shot X-Men: Odd Men Out in 2008.

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13.

In 1983, David Cockrum produced The Futurians, first as a graphic novel, and then as an ongoing series published by Lodestone Comics.

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14.

Marvel eventually provided an undisclosed amount of financial support in exchange for David Cockrum agreeing to terms protected by a nondisclosure agreement.

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15.

David Cockrum was survived by his wife of many years, Paty Cockrum, a longtime member of Marvel's 1970s production staff, and by his son and two stepchildren.

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