His Work
Overgard's fiction includes the novels Moonlight Surveillance, Pieces of a Hero, Once More the Hero, Shanghai Tango, The Evil Chaser, The Divide, The Man from Raffles, and A Few Good Men. His screenplays include The Last Dinosaur (1977), The Bermuda Depths (1978), Ivory Ape (1980), Bushido Blade (1981), and the animated cartoons Silver Hawks and 19 episodes of ThunderCats (airing in the mid-1980s).
He is more remembered for his 31 years (almost half his life) on Steve Roper; "one of the best-drawn and stylish adventure strips" (Marschall 1985), and he varied it with fast-sequence montages, close-ups, and views from different angles. He also did the lettering after 1977, defining the strip's characters and aging them over the years.
Rudy showed similar artwork, but a very different situation. It was launched (in Overgard's own words, 1984) "to the puzzled disbelief of comic traditionalists. A gag strip about a talking monkey in Hollywood, drawn in a realistic continuity style? What?" Rudy was a Bonobo Chimpanzee who otherwise resembled actor George Burns, right down to the cigar, wise cracks, and career in vaudeville, movies, and standup comedy. "Literate and well-drawn," (Marschall 1985). Holtz (2005) added that it showed smart humor, character-driven stories, intelligent writing and great art that "transcends the run-of-the-mill comic strip level"— all of which (in his opinion) "doomed" it in an era favoring minimalist gag strips.
The 1984 collection of Rudy strips ended with a drawing of its protagonist, sport coat flung over his shoulder and lighting a cigar as he walked away with a simple "Ciao."
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