2019 marks the 50th Anniversary of writer/artist Jim Steranko’s Captain America trilogy that many still consider the greatest Captain America story ever told, for both its story and its art. The impact of Steranko’s three issues – a tour-de-force of the firebrand’s verbal and visual storytelling skills and talents that branded him the Jimi Hendrix of Comics during Steranko’s adjacent meteoric rise to fame in the late-‘60s – is in converse proportion to their small number. Join comic book art historian Arlen Schumer as he revisits, and revels in, Steranko’s magnum opus.

ARLEN SCHUMER creates award-winning comic book-styled illustrations for the advertising and editorial markets, is a member of The Society of Illustrators, and is one of the foremost historians of comic book art. Comic Book Artist magazine named him "one of the more articulate and enthusiastic advocates of comic book art in America,” his coffeetable art book The Silver Age of Comic Book Art won the Independent Publishers Award for Best Popular Culture Book. ABC-TV's 2020 called him “one of the countryʼs preeminent authorities on comics and culture.” His other books are Visions from The Twilight Zone and The Neal Adams Sketchbook. Schumer is also acclaimed for his dynamic, bombastic VisuaLecture performances such as this one.

JIM STERANKO has worn many hats in his career – artist, author, illustrator, art director, designer, entertainer – but he wore them all when he put on quite a show at Marvel Comics at the end of the Silver Age, between 1966 and ’70. Each issue, indeed each page of Steranko’s Marvel works was a supercharged surprise, as he relentlessly, iconoclastically experimented with mixed media applications, fusing a graphic designer’s and illustrator’s approach to the medium of sequential storytelling. His influence on the field today is in converse proportion to the relatively small body of work he produced, "quality, not quantity” writ large.

This event is free and open to the public.

Presented by Michael Dooley’s “Design History of Comics & Animation” class.