Paul Rivoche

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Fan
Name: Paul Rivoche
Alias(es):
Type: fanartist, professional artist
Fandoms: Star Trek TOS
Communities:
Other: Star Trek Universe: A Portfolio by Rivoche
URL: Rocketfiction (art website) (Wayback Apr 30/24)
Instagram(Wayback May 3/24),
YouTube channel (via Wayback May 3/24)
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Paul Rivoche is a fanartist active in the Star Trek TOS fandom during the 1970s. He is now a professional comics and animation artist, living in Toronto, Canada, and has worked in a number of areas as a professional illustrator and commercial artist.

From His Biography

Paul Rivoche is a versatile illustrator, animation background designer, and graphic novelist. After early work creating comics for emerging indie comics publishers, he moved from Ottawa to Toronto, Canada and became a key background designer/layout artist for Nelvana Animation, who in the early 1980’s were creating their now-cult-classic science fiction animated feature "Rock 'n' Rule".

Later, he created freelance illustrations for many major Canadian magazines and publishers, as well as drawing numerous comic books and pieces of cover art for US publishers such as DC Comics and Marvel Comics, working on characters such as Superman, Batman, and Iron Man. He has drawn several graphic novels, notably "The Forgotten Man", a 294-page examination of the great depression published by HarperCollins.

In the animation field, he created background designs and storyboard art for companies such as Warner Brothers, for their series “Batman Animated”, “Batman Beyond”, their animated film “Justice League: The New Frontier”, and many others.

Recently, he designed two seasons of key background locations for the Netflix animated series "The Hollow", did locations for 40 episodes of Corus Entertainment's animated cartoon series "DNAce", and served as the chief background designer for the upcoming feature animated film "Robot Dreams".

 [1]

Rivoche is best known for his Star Trek art portfolio "Star Trek Universe: A Portfolio by Rivoche", which was published in 1976, two years before he graduated high school[2]. Around this time he also had sold a comic based on Arthur C. Clarke’s science fiction short story ‘Exile of the Aeons’ (in collaboration with bpNichol) to science fiction magazine Andromeda and Gamescience Corp's Star Fleet Battle Manual game in 1977[3]. In November 1978 he moved to Toronto from Ottawa and eventually began working for Nelvana Animation, before going freelance in 1979. In the early 1980s he was brought in by Andromeda editor Dean Mott to illustrate his comic Mister X (Vortex Comics), and while he ultimately quit before the comic was released, his work appeared on the covers of issues 1-3.

I couldn’t honestly claim to have ever have fully ‘worked in the comics industry’ in the true sense of that phrase, in terms of being a full-time artist. I’ve done a number of different things for comics, some stories, some covers, but purposely never fully committed to the US comics industry. I’ve spent much more of my career working in various areas of commercial art, notably animation design and, more recently, advertising art...


...Mainly, I just never could reconcile becoming a part of the rigid production line of mainstream North American comics, with its division of labour and its politics and so on. As a beginner, if you were lucky, you might be paired with someone really creative, someone with whom you had good chemistry. If things clicked like that you might make good progress, have good sales, and progress to a position where you could get some creative control, write your own material, carve out your own niche. A number of people have done that. But you have to commit to that industry, put your fate in its hands, resign yourself to being under the thumb of various editors and writers and forces, often arbitrary and whimsical forces at that, such as the vagaries of ‘fashion’ and what’s so-called ‘hot’. . . today’s hot, is tomorrow’s cold, unfortunately, as many worthy writers and artists have found over the years.


I was never willing to trust my work and career to that process. Besides, the scripts and heroes (who nowadays mostly aren’t heroic at all!) bored me.

 [4].

Gallery

Conventions

As Inspiration for a Zine

Winston Howlett cited art by Rivoche as inspiration for his 1979 novel, Captain Uhura, a zine that Rivoche later contributed art to:

I started looking at some Paul Rivoche artwork at a convention, and I said, ‘Hey, I’ve got some great ideas for stories!’ just from looking at this artwork. I said, ‘How about if I make Uhura the captain of her own ship?’ Because she was now independent of Kirk; she didn’t have to hang around and trail around behind him. She could do anything she wanted now. So I put together five stories for an episodic novel to make CAPTAIN UHURA. [5]

Interviews

Archives/Zines/Collections/Communities

Zines

As Editor

As Contributor

  • Andromeda (1977-1979) - while not strictly a fanzine, this science fiction comic magazine frequently included comics based on established works as well as original pieces.
    • Issue #1 (1977) - back cover
    • Issue #2 (1978) - interior art
    • Issue #3 (1978) - front cover and interior art; "Exile of the Aeons": Arthur C. Clarke (Original); b.p. nichol (Adaptation); Paul Rivoche (Artist)
    • Issue #4 (1978) - interior art
    • Issue #5 (1979) - interior art
    • Issue #6 (1979) - "Where Do You Get Those Ideas?" article
  • Captain Uhura (1979)

References

  1. ^ "About" Paul Rivoche: Rocketdreams - 2023 (via Wayback Dec 6/23)
  2. ^ "A conversation with Canadian illustrator, animation designer and comic book artist/writer Paul Rivoche" by Jeffery Klaehn - Image Text Journal V. 8, Issue #3 (2021) (Via Wayback Mar 14/24)
  3. ^ comment from Coast Con Fan in "Artifacts from Known Space" thread at Propnomicon blog, Jan 5/14 (via Wayback May 3/24)
  4. ^ "A conversation with Canadian illustrator, animation designer and comic book artist/writer Paul Rivoche" by Jeffery Klaehn - Image Text Journal V. 8, Issue #3 (2021) (Via Wayback Mar 14/24)
  5. ^ from Creating Universes: A Writers' Panel: Winston A. Howlett, Jean Lorrah, and Pat Paul (1989)
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