Marshall Rogers | |
---|---|
![]() Marshall Rogers, New York City, 1979
|
|
Born | William Marshall Rogers III January 22, 1950 Flushing, New York |
Died | March 24, 2007 Fremont, California |
(aged 57)
Nationality | American |
Area(s) | Penciller, Inker, Colourist |
Notable works
|
Detective Comics Detectives Inc. |
Awards | Extended list |
William Marshall Rogers III (January 22, 1950 – March 24, 2007), known professionally as Marshall Rogers, was an American comic book artist best known for his work at Marvel and DC Comics in the 1970s, particularly as one of the illustrators of Batman and the Silver Surfer. In addition, Rogers illustrated one of the first graphic novels, Detectives Inc. (1979).
William Marshall Rogers III was born in the Flushing neighborhood of the New York City borough of Queens, and raised there and in Ardsley, New York. He took up mechanical drawing in high school, and then attended Kent State University, in Ohio, to study architecture, feeling this
...would keep my parents happy, because it's a legitimate profession, and would allow me some artistic outlet as I worked. Well, I quickly found out that the world wasn't ready for another Frank Lloyd Wright ... and I would end up doing parking lots and designing heating / cooling systems. I had wanted to draw and be imaginative. And then there was one last stumbling block, and that was calculus. ... I just couldn't grasp those weird theories that were running around.
He studied architectural drawing, and his work was characterized by the depiction of detailed rendering of buildings and structures.
He left college in 1971, before graduating, and returned home to New York, where he discovered his family was moving to Denver, Colorado, where his father's employer, Johns Manville, was relocating. Opting to remain, he completed a 52-page story he had begun in college and presented it in 1972 as a sample to Marvel Comics production manager John Verpoorten, who found Rogers' work wanting. To earn a living, Rogers did illustrations for men's magazines that he described as "[r]eal low-grade schlock sleazo magazines that had illustrations to precede the stories." When one client went bankrupt, owing him at least $1,000, a friend, Jim Geraghty, offered him a rent-free house for the winter in Easthampton, New York, on Long Island, in exchange for "four or five illustrations" for a local art project. The following summer he worked in a hardware store for several months, was fired, and while living on unemployment benefits approached the short-lived Atlas/Seaboard Comics and