Den Vol. 5 – The Price of Memories
Cartoonist: Richard Corben
Letterer: Nate Piekos
Art Restoration and Project Art Director: José Villarrubia
Publisher: Dark Horse Comics
Publication Date: February 2025
There’s a case to be made that Richard Corben was one of the greatest comics artists of all time. Corben, who passed away in 2020 at the age of 80, won several of the medium’s most prestigious honors, including the Spectrum Award for Grand Master in 2009, induction into the Will Eisner Hall of Fame in 2012, and the 2018 Grand Prix at Angoulême. His body of work has spanned from underground comix to the Big 2 to animation and mainstream album art, specifically for Meat Loaf’s Bat Out of Hell LP. And along the way he won the admiration of creative heavyweights ranging from Guillermo Del Torro to Mike Mignola.
Corben’s defining work is arguably Den, a character who first appeared in an animated short film Corben made in 1968, before going on to be the subject of stories that spanned hundreds of pages Corben drew from 1973 through the mid-90s. With nudity a near-constant (men and women, full frontal, sometimes monsters too), Den comics first appeared as underground publications, before then going on to be published by Heavy Metal and later through Corben’s own Fantagor imprint. Over time, however, the full scope of Corben’s Den stories became decentralized and difficult to track down. This has now changed.
This month marks the publication of Den Vol. 5, the fifth and final volume of a Den restoration project put out by Dark Horse and led by comics colorist José Villarrubia, who worked with letterer Nate Piekos on this new series of gorgeous hardcover books that deliver Den in what is presumably the highest-quality print format its ever had. The first book was published in 2023, and now here five books later we come to the end of the journey, with a series of behind-the-scenes looks and intros/outros by a list of creators that includes Villarrubia, Patton Oswald, Matt Kindt, Cullen Bunn, and Del Torro.
I’ve spent recent weeks reading every page of these new books, in preparation for reviewing the final volume. There’s a couple of major challenges to writing this sort of piece. The first is that Den is a masterpiece by a towering and singular comics talent. As David Lynch said of his own work, the film IS the talking, and so it feels like the same can be said about Den. The work is so visionary and uniquely-stylized, that to describe it as portal fantasy (which it kind of starts out as) feels like a bit of a disservice. So too does saying it exaggerates human physical ideals to catch the eye and convey the essential nature of why we follow fictionalized characters (although I think it does both these things).
I think what I’d like to instead write about Den is that now that it’s restored and readily available in full for the first time, it deserves to take its place among not just the great works of American fiction, but among the best comics ever made. This is storytelling so essential and immersive that it’s a pillar of the medium and should be recognized as such. That’s not praise that I bestow lightly, but I really did find these comics to be worthy. There’s rough edges to them, sure — the first volume due to its publication history is a little disjointed, and the final volume promises more stories that never came — but the high quality of the experience and storytelling overpowers these quibbles.
Ultimately, this is a visionary work the feels as if it were executed by a master who took the time to go deep within and tell a story right from his creative subconscious. If you’re familiar with Corben’s work, you know there’s nothing quite like Corben art. Well, of all his work that I’ve so far read (which, admittedly is primarily from 1995 onward) there’s nothing quite like Den.
The second reason it’s difficult to write this piece is that all five of these new volumes have introductions with incredible insights from some of comics most thoughtful creators. Part of what I found myself musing on while reading Den was the work’s relationships to dreams. There’s something of a dreamlike feel to Den throughout. While it’s explored more in the animated film that precedes the comics, the lead character uses an odd technology to be transfixed in this world onto the nude muscular figure of Den. He wakes up, unsure of what’s happening but in an idealized state. And it’s not a stretch to say in all his adventures he encounters his fantasy woman, and, of course, makes love to her.
That’s all part of what’s for sale here, but as Christos Gage writes in his introduction for this final book, these comics are also like nothing you’ve ever laid eyes on … yet they feel like a window into a world part of you always sensed was out there. I certainly felt that way. There’s a continuity that runs through all of these volumes, but it’s selective, serving primarily to heighten the dreamlike, fluid state of the narrative. Things we assume are undone, replaced by more psychedelic or fantastical ideas. Minor villains return to be trounced, side characters get body horrific endings, and the identity of some of Den’s closest friends and enemies starts to blur.
There’s perhaps some counterintuitive choices made with the storytelling in Den, choices that feel like they should sow a little confusion — yet they never really do. These comics also have an ineffable quality to them. It’s all told in a way that it feels organic to Corben’s vision and world, as if he’s just a conduit for tales that must be told this way.
And yes, as I mentioned earlier, this last volume leaves off on a promise that there’s more story to come, but for whatever reason, Corben never returned to Den. I believe he mentioned some of the ideas he had in mind, by never drew them in any public way. Yet, these comics are so narratively consistent that it is perhaps the least frustrating never-finished work I’ve yet come across. To me, that just speaks to how immersive and satisfying it feels to read every last page of Den.
Den Vol. 5: The Price of Memories is available now
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