Heavy Metal Magazine cover featuring the strip's main early characters: The Queen, Den and Catherine Wells Den is a fantasy comic book series by Richard Corben.
It is about the adventures of a young man who is whisked to a fantasy world named Neverwhere where he is changed into a naked muscled adventurer who is hunted by powerful forces, threatened by dangerous creatures and lusted by impossibly beautiful naked women.
This series was a major feature in the early Heavy Metal magazine in the late 1970s and it was adapted in a highly condensed fashion in the Heavy Metal animated film.
The Den saga originated from a 1968 short film entitled Neverwhere (the first graphic novel would share the same title), animated and produced by Corben at his native Calvin Studios in Kansas City.
The Den series was published in the following graphic novels and serials, in order:
- Neverwhere
- Muvovum
- Children Of Fire
- Dreams (compilation of smaller color Den comics)
- Elements (second compilation of further smaller color comics)
- DenSaga Vol 1-4
Changing Art Styles
Compared to many comic and graphic novel franchises in the industry, Corben's art style, techniques, and mediums changed noticeably and frequently over the course from the 1979 Neverwhere graphic novel to the most recent DenSaga comic magazines in 1992.
The first act of Neverwhere begins with rough, contrasted, and grainy illustration with an overlay of soft but basic shading; a semi-cartoon style with simple desert-and-red-maroon palettes, and these first chapters were initially published in issue 2 of Grimwit, an underground comic fanzine Corben contributed to in 1973. Neverwheres pages were later illustrated in a more detailed and painstaking airbrush technique, which would eventually occupy Corben's time for the next five years before the graphic novel was completed. Even in the more technically detailed chapters of the graphic novel, the scene backgrounds mirrored Corben's own past experience in the animation business; minimally detailed backdrops consisting either of pure white, blurred smudge for interiors, or even a large, multicolored psychedelic swirly haze for outdoor skies.
Even among Neverwhere's airbrushed pages, inconsistencies in coloring and detail work are still visibly noticeable. For example, a page in which Den battles an old nemesis appear as if Den's skin is colored with simple two tones of red and pale flesh, roughly shading between colors, and with very sharp and sudden shadows. In the very next page, shadows, tones, and light blend together more smoothly, and are significantly darker, and shading is finer. These noticeable inconsistencies of technique and the artist's own aesthetic pickings are present throughout the entire book.
In the second Den story, also published in Heavy Metal in the early 1980's and published as a graphic novel in 1982, Muvovum would later be picked up on in a more thoroughly detailed style that sustained consistency throughout the entire story, and Corben would implement a new method of coloring to match this change. For this, he incorporated an expensive and time-consuming overlay technique he developed and tweaked to suit his personal needs to illustrate Muvovum. This technique was previously explored by Corben for his retelling of The Voyage Of Sindbad: New Tales Of The Arabian Nights (1979), and even further refined in his 1983 graphic novel Mutant World. Detail in Muvovum was not only a result of the overlay technique he implemented, as Corben had also emphasized more detail in realistic, rather than cartoon-influenced, human anatomy of his characters in the pre-coloring phase, albeit keeping his occasional liking to exaggerated caricature-like appearances of certain characters who were less significant to the story's main plot.
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