Steve Whitaker

photo by Matt Brooker, used with permission

This isn’t an easy thing to write, and it is a personal indulgence, but I felt I absolutely needed to include some sort of tribute to Steve, who died a couple of years ago.

Some of you will know the name from the terribly few strips he had published – I am proud to have put out the only two whole comics drawn by Steve, Saga of the Man-Elf 1-2, written by Guy Lawley and derived in part from characters by Michael Moorcock. He wasn’t short of talent, but he wasn’t great at being productive (and those who knew him will be smiling at the understatement there). He may be more familiar as a genuinely superb colourist, most famously on V For Vendetta. And yes, like everyone else, Steve thought it should never have been coloured, but he did a beautiful job.

But none of that is why he is here. My friend Dave Dursley and I decided to start a fanzine around 1981, and we wrote to a bunch of people whose work we liked in other zines. I soon got a call from Steve , and I’m afraid you’ll have to indulge me for an anecdote here. We arranged to meet at the next Westminster mart. He’d be in the Westminster Arms at noon. How would I recognize him? 6’3, brown hair, full beard and moustache, wearing boots, jeans and a chunky white sweater, carrying a bag of comics. I got there on time, and there was someone who fitted the description in every detail. “Hi, are you Steve Whitaker?” “Ah, you must be Martin Skidmore.” “Yes, great to meet you, Steve.” “Oh, I’m not Steve.” One of the more bewildering moments of my life – it turned out that Steve was close friends with another person we’d written too, so he’d come to meet me too, and as it happened Frank Plowright fitted the description perfectly too.

So Steve wasn’t the first person I met through comic fandom, by a few minutes. Nonetheless, he was the most influential. Most of my best friends now, several of whom you will find on this site, I met via Steve. I was cocky enough to start a fanzine and imagine I had some idea what I was talking about (this is embarrassing to remember now), but I soon realised, from talking to Steve, how little I knew.

I never worked out how Steve knew so much about comics. He wasn’t one of those people who had filled his head with one thing to the exclusion of all else, but he knew more than seemed possible. Once we interviewed Will Eisner, soon after The Dreamer, his roman a clef about his early days in comics, had come out. Steve wanted to check his deductions of who the people were and ask about the two, I think it was, who he hadn’t identified. Steve was saying things like “Obviously this printer is…” and “I assume the woman in this panel is…” and Eisner was literally agape with amazement. I remember him saying “I thought I was the only person in the whole world who would have any idea who that was” and the like. The two he hadn’t identified turned out to be characters in a panel or two for a function, not based on anyone.

But really, it wasn’t factual knowledge that affected me so much. We’d talk about comic writing and art, and Steve’s understanding of these was incomparably more sophisticated and advanced than mine. Than mine is now, come to that, let alone nearly thirty years ago. He’d explain why some things worked and some didn’t, what he loved about Ditko (his favourite) and many others. He expanded my ways of reading and thinking about comics, and kept doing it.

Steve contributed to that early fanzine, and continued to contribute and be an important influence when I moved on to FA – arguably my friend Dave, with whom I had been at school (where he reintroduced me to comics, via Howard the Duck) and Cambridge, and with whom I did my first zine, who I saw pretty much every week through those formative comic-fan years of the ’80s, was the biggest single influence, but Steve was at least close.

Having said all that, the real reason for writing all this is that Steve was one of the best friends I have ever had. I loved him. He was funny and always entertaining, he could talk interestingly about art and music and movies and plenty more, besides comics, and he was generous. I don’t mean with money, as he never had any, but with his time and knowledge, always keen to discuss and explain. Steve’s death came in the same week as my mother’s, and Steve’s affected me more: this isn’t such a big statement if you know much about my relationship with my mother, but the key point is that Steve had had a huge affect on my whole adult life, and a wholly positive one. I miss him every day, and restarting FA in online form has made me think of him even more. I keep wishing he were here to review or analyse something, or to conduct an interview.

(As it happens, there is one big interview co-conducted by Steve that has never been published, and we hope to run that here soon, along with the odd rerun of pieces like an ’80s interview with Gil Kane and a superb essay on Hugo Pratt.)

Links

Matt Brooker in particular has been posting scan’s of Steve’s work to the Jellytown LiveJournal account and a flickr account, and maintaining Steve’s own LiveJournal.

Tributes

Matt Brooker

Eddie Campbell

Me

John Freeman on Down the Tubes, including quotes from lots of people.