One of two pages I bought directly from Russ Heath at Wondercon. After asking him to sign my Haunted Tank page, he nonchalantly said, "I've got some more pages here. Pull up a chair and have a look if you're interested." (!) I spent about 45 minutes pouring over the pages to the Rocketeer and finally settled on the two shown here. While I was pondering my purchase, I asked Russ if he preferred drawing characters or machinery. He said no preference and then started pointing out things he had difficulty with on the cars seen on these two Rocketeer pages. What gave Russ Heath trouble? The size of the tires on the cars. He explained it was difficult to get the smaller tires to look right.

While trying to choose among four pages I'd pulled out, Russ started telling me what people tended to lean towards--"most people like the action pages, but I prefer this one," he said, referring to this page. He went on to say how he used a reference photo of an old house to get the detail on the lower left panel just right. Then he pointed out the guy with the broken leg just above--"that's just about the most grusome thing you'll see in a comic book these days." Makes my leg hurt just looking at it. Anyway, I love the film noir lighting used on this page. It's a nice contrast to the daylight scene of page 32.

Grabbed this page on ebay at the height of the "Pirates of the Carribean" movie crazy. Ya gotta admit, Heath doing dueling galleons is pretty rockin'. Anybody know what issue of Penthouse Comix this story appeared in?

No one does WWII military hardware better than Russ Heath, as this stunning page from the recent two-issue mini-series proves. Steve Wyatt sold me this page near the close of Wondercon 2002. Before leaving the show, I managed to find Russ Heath still at his table in artists alley and asked him to add his signature to a fourth page (he had already signed the other three shown here earlier that same day).