Alec Stevens
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Alec Preston Stevens (born 22 February 1965 in Salvador, Bahia, Brazil---where his father, a USAF officer stationed in various parts of the world, was on military assignment) is a professional illustrator and musician.
At age twenty, Stevens began his career as a professional illustrator for magazines, books, and newspapers as well as an artist/writer for comics and graphic novels. His work for the former includes a fourteen year stint as a contributing artist to The New York Times Book Review, as well as for The New Yorker, Tower Records' Pulse! and Classical Pulse! magazines, Reader's Digest Corp., New Jersey Monthly, United Features Syndicate, AT&T, and numerous other accounts.
His comics work includes literary adaptations (Wilde, Lovecraft, Dinesen, Dostoyevsky, Reymont, and Jan Neruda) for Fantagraphics Books, Heavy Metal Magazine, and Kitchen Sink Press. Stevens also wrote and illustrated two graphic novels, The Sinners and Hardcore, for DC's Piranha Press imprint in 1988 and 1989. The brooding, expressionistic style of writing and art drew favourable reviews which cited the work of artist Edvard Munch and existentialist authors Albert Camus and Franz Kafka. Stevens had an original story serialised in Dark Horse Comics' Deadline: USA in 1991-2, and from 1993-1999 he drew a string of short stories for DC's Paradox Press imprint. In 1993 he illustrated Neil Gaiman's "A Tale of Two Cities" in DC/Vertigo's Sandman #51, reprinted as the lead story in the World's End collection.
A dedicated Christian since late 1989, Alec Stevens has also published two issues of Glory to God which feature stories from the Bible, historical accounts, and modern-day testimonies of faith. His most recent work (July, 2006) is the full colour Sadhu Sundar Singh graphic novel, published under his own Calvary Comics imprint. This work reveals his mature artistic style in which stark expressionism has given way to a more lyrical, naturalistic drawing style whilst retaining the design-conscious use of blacks and negative space. The flat, posterlike palette of fauvist colours in his earlier work has also been superseded by a far more wide-ranging spectrum of carefully modelled hues.
Since 1992 Stevens has served as an instructor at the Joe Kubert School of Cartoon and Graphic Art, Inc. Many of his former students are now industry professionals, and cite him as a notable influence.
Also a talented musician, Alec Stevens is a guitarist in the Jan Akkerman mould. He has done session work for Paragon Records (London, UK) in 1988 and 1992, and his band The Quest were a staple in New York City clubs like CBGB's and Kenny's Castaways in the early '90s. He later played with Christian bands As Living Stones and Force for Good. From 2002-3 he was a tenor in the front rank of the Times Square Church choir, singing before hundreds of thousands in an evangelistic outreach in Nigeria, West Africa, as well as in Carnegie Hall for a 9/11 benefit.
