Eclipse Comics’ graphic album The Rocketeer collects the first five chapters of the eponymous series by Dave Stevens. Chapters One and Two appeared as backup features in issues 2 and 3 of Mike Grell’s Starslayer from Pacific Comics. The publisher later printed Chapters Three and Four in Pacific Presents numbers 1 and 2. Following the collapse of Pacific Comics, Eclipse Comics published the fifth chapter in a special Rocketeer issue.

These five chapters introduce the main characters – Cliff Secord, a stunt pilot who becomes the Rocketeer; Peevy, the mechanic who helps Cliff figure out the rocket pack; Betty, Cliff’s girlfriend whose appearance Stevens based on Bette Page; Colonel Mayberg and Noah Dietrich, who seek to recover the rocket pack for Howard Hughes; and various Nazi agents working to steal the technology for Nazi Germany. As Harlan Ellison wrote in his 1985 introduction, “The Rocketeer is something special. For all the hopeful attempts at doing a period comic book that have popped up these last few years, popped up and vanished, only The Rocketeer captures the feel of those days. The artwork is modern, yet it has a tone of the Twenties and Thirties. The dialogue isn’t 100% of the times, but it’s damned close. And even if the first two sections aren’t as masterful as the final three – indicating that Stevens learned on the job – they are hip-deep in the right kind of nostalgia.” Fans of the 1991 Disney film will find all of the elements that made the story a fun adventure.

The success of the character led Comico Comics and Dark Horse Comics to publish a continuation in Rocketeer Adventure Magazine that Dark Horse later collected in The Rocketeer: Cliff’s New York Adventure. Following Stevens’ passing in 2008, IDW Publishing collected the entire series in 2009 before beginning various Rocketeer miniseries in 2011, with the sixth IDW miniseries appearing in 2015. ( )

Covers all five chapters of the story. ( )

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