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I’d never heard of Ron Cobb until I read Paul M. Sammon’s interview with him for Cinefantastique on the set of Conan the Barbarian. He was the film’s production designer and when I checked out his concept art, my brain fell out of my head. Just, tremendous. It suffuses the movie, as you’d expect, but it also offers up a vision distinct from it. I mean, just look, I bet you’ll feel like they are simultaneously familiar and strange, like something dropped through a portal from a parallel universe. I was instantly obsessed.
Cobb is one of those guys whose work in film in the late ’70s and early ’80s is foundational to so many things that came after him, yet he remains somewhat unknown and certainly under-appreciated. In addition to Conan, he was the production designer for The Running Man, The Last Starfighter and Leviathan, and was in the art department for Alien, Aliens, My Science Project, Raiders of the Lost Ark, Total Recall and heaps more. He was also a key part of the team that designed the DeLorean time machine for Back to the Future and created the Hammerhead alien for Star Wars.
Colorvision (1981) collects a range of his early work, including for comics, monster magazines and his political cartoons. All that stuff is good, but I tracked it down for the Conan, Star Wars and Alien concept art. Cobb’s work on the latter is clearly overshadowed in the popular consciousness by H.R. Giger’s contribution, but he’s equally important — all the tech, the vibe of the ship, the sense that the ship is both complex and rudimentary, it’s working class feel, all comes from Cobb, and the movie would suffer without it. And it has a wider web of influence. You can see echoes of Cobb in just about any industrial science fiction, whereas Giger’s xenomorph is so distinct that its influence almost always comes off as imitation (even Giger’s own work struggles in that shadow — look no further than Species for proof that).
Titan released The Art of Ron Cobb in 2022 and it is a more representative look at the late Cobb’s career. It’s also easier to find than Colorvision, though Colorvision has a couple pieces that the newer book leaves out. You can probably just get the Titan retrospective, though, unless you’re a loon like me. |
