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Take flight with Cliff and Betty in this beautiful oversized collection that features the original complete comics saga! This long-out-of-print collection, and Eisner-award winner for best design, features the entire Rocketeer saga by Dave Stevens, plus more than 100 pages of supplemental material-sketches, prelims, and tons more-giving new insight into the artist's thought processes as he was developing The Rocketeer! And all wrapped up in a lovely slipcase! Dave Stevens' The Rocketeer burst onto the shelves of comic book shops 40 years ago! This beautifully illustrated and charming story features the adventures of down-and-out stunt pilot Cliff Secord after he finds an experimental jetpack. With the help of his closest friend and confidante Peevy, and the support (mostly) of his beautiful girlfriend Betty, Cliff takes to the skies in 1938 Los Angeles. Intrigue abounds as Cliff finds himself fighting enemy spies and nefarious criminals, all the while trying to keep his personal life with Betty from being waylaid by his double-life as The Rocketeer!… (more)
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These five chapters introduce the main characters – Cliff Secord, a stunt pilot who becomes the Rocketeer; Peevy, the mechanic who helps Cliff figure out the rocket pack; Betty, Cliff’s girlfriend whose appearance Stevens based on Bette Page; Colonel Mayberg and Noah Dietrich, who seek to recover the rocket pack for Howard Hughes; and various Nazi agents working to steal the technology for Nazi Germany. As Harlan Ellison wrote in his 1985 introduction, “The Rocketeer is something special. For all the hopeful attempts at doing a period comic book that have popped up these last few years, popped up and vanished, only The Rocketeer captures the feel of those days. The artwork is modern, yet it has a tone of the Twenties and Thirties. The dialogue isn’t 100% of the times, but it’s damned close. And even if the first two sections aren’t as masterful as the final three – indicating that Stevens learned on the job – they are hip-deep in the right kind of nostalgia.” Fans of the 1991 Disney film will find all of the elements that made the story a fun adventure.
The success of the character led Comico Comics and Dark Horse Comics to publish a continuation in Rocketeer Adventure Magazine that Dark Horse later collected in The Rocketeer: Cliff’s New York Adventure. Following Stevens’ passing in 2008, IDW Publishing collected the entire series in 2009 before beginning various Rocketeer miniseries in 2011, with the sixth IDW miniseries appearing in 2015.