Yesterday marked the fortieth anniversary of the death of Gene Day. A rising star at Marvel Comics, he was barely thirty-one years old. In a career not quite spanning a decade, he left an indelible legacy upon the comics and SFF fandom scene of the time.

I wrote a post about Gene Day’s Savage Sword of Conan art last year. Richard Toogood, a fantasy/sword-and-sorcery scholar of note, was kind enough to stop by and comment. Here is some of what he had to say:

“Not much stirs me from self-imposed seclusion these days. But recognition of the genius of Gene Day is something for which I will always make an exception. The guy was simply brilliant. An amazing renaissance man. And no volume of plaudits from me can do his genius justice.
On top of everything else he achieved he was the dynamo that powered the entire 1970s fanzine culture. At the heart of that was his own pioneering zine Dark Fantasy (which famously gave birth to [Charles R. Saunders'] Imaro, of course). But there can scarcely be another zine produced in the period that he didn't support, no matter how amateurish, cack-handed or short-lived it might be. Just try and find one without at least one illustration by him. You'll be hard pressed to. Day was immensely generous. And the culture never really recovered from the loss of him.”

Well said. Gene Day was the first editor to get Saunders' Imaro into print. He was also the first to illustrate CRS' hero, as I recall. When it came to the Canadian SFF community--comics or prose--Gene was a force of nature.

While drawing, editing and writing, Day became good friends with authors like Saunders and Charles de Lint. He also befriended a budding comics creator by the name of Dave Sim, who would go on to craft the award-winning Cerebus comics. Sim, who knew Gene for about a decade, wrote a detailed and moving essay on Gene which was published on what would've been Gene Day's fiftieth birthday in 2001. It can be read here.

For those who don’t like to click on links, I’ll give a very condensed version of Mr. Day’s career. Gene worked tirelessly on his art, all the while publishing Dark Fantasy and contributing art to various other fanzines. He got his foot in the door at Marvel with SSOC. He got his big break inking Mike Zeck on Master of Kung Fu. When Mike Zeck left the title, Gene took over full art duties. Sales began to rise. At the same time, Marvel’s new Editor in Chief, Jim Shooter, started trying to micromanage Gene’s art. The stress of that and meeting monthly deadlines basically worked Gene into the ground. He died of a heart attack.

Shooter also ran off Marvel stalwarts like Roy Thomas and Doug Moench during this era, by the way.

All of the Dave Sim essay is great, but I found this last paragraph particularly poignant:

“In a perfect world -- in what I would consider a perfect world -- Gene Day's adaptation of Robert E. Howard's Pigeons From Hell enters its record-breaking thirtieth printing this year. Still the flagship volume in the extensive and ever-expanding backlist of Gene's own Shadow Press (which occupies a quarter-page in the Star System catalogue), it will soon be joined by the first printing of his latest effort, two years in the making, as all of us head to [Gene's hometown] to salute him on his 50th birthday: August 13, 2001.”

Raise a glass to the shade of Gene Day, sword-brothers. He died with his boots on, doing what he loved, all in service to an uncaring paymaster, loyal to his salt until the bitter end. If that ain't S&S, I don't know what is.

Feel free to check out the gallery below, featuring a full spectrum of art from Mr. Day's career.

Check out this page from MoKF #118. This is the kind of thing that stripped the gears of Jim Shooter, Marvel’s Editor in Chief. He had an ironclad rule: "No continuous backgrounds". A good rule—in general—because most comic artists can’t pull it off. Jim Steranko and Paul Gulacy were two who could. Gene Day was another. Fighting over things like this undoubtedly helped lead to Gene’s early death.

Gene was very loyal to Marvel, but he also did some art for DC, like this Detective Comics cover.

I thought I would end this retrospective with this cool Elric cover that Gene did for Chaosium. He was just coming into his own. A shame, indeed.