This is a small, unofficial site devoted to greatest cartoon strip of all time, Steven Appleby's ROCKETS... passing overhead which appeared in the NME and then Section 5 of The Observer in the 1980s.
It featured a rather hapless hero called Captain Jim Star and the other inmates of his space ship, the Boiling Hell. They drift through space, endlessly awaiting orders from Mission Control that never come.
A nice recurring theme was the way that Star's vanity was reflected in all the 'Jim Star' Products that appeared in the cartoon, featuring the image of the Captain, of course. Steven Appleby did a nice line in real mail-order goods, including a mobile and a tea towel.
The strip reached its zenith with a sequence of cartoons about fun-fur; the line 'the fun-fur has developed rudimentary intelligence' coupled with pictures of blobs of fur saying 'what's for dinner?' and 'what's on TV?' was the sublimest moment in cartoon history. Captain Jim Star also appeared in TV adverts for the Goldstar electronics group.
Shockwave NEWS!
Captain Star TV series
Steven Appleby: the man He has drawn and written numerous books, the latest of which is Antmen Carry Away My Thoughts as Soon as I Think Them, published by Bloomsbury in the UK. The illustrations on this site are from Rockets... a way of Life published by Assorted Images in 1988 and long-since out of print. (Thank you to Jon Ward for such a waykewl engagement present.)
Steven also drew the cool Eiffel Tower rockets on the artwork for the Pixies' last album Trompe le Monde.
Some off-site links:
all images © Steven Appleby index of rockets.demon.co.uk text © 1997 Giles Booth |