Potrzebie

2012-01-27T15:07:00.001-05:00

Walter Gibson talks about pulp magazines and writing The Shadow.

Topps #15

2012-01-27T11:40:00.002-05:00

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Art Spiegelman and Wacky Packages at Angouleme 2012.

Wood Chips #41: Urban vertical vegetation

2012-01-26T09:45:00.003-05:00

Bosco Verticale (vertical forest) is a project of planned residential towers in Milan. Wally Wood visualized the same concept six decades ago in Weird Science #19 (May-June 1953). Of course, if Martin Dakan has a few more drinks, he might fall through that big hole in his floor.

2012-01-17T10:00:00.006-05:00

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Paul Kirchner tells the story behind his Dope Rider which ran in High Times. Dope Rider first appeared for three episodes in Harpoon/Apple Pie (November 1974 - May 1975), followed by seven occasional episodes in High Times (August/September 1975 - May 1986). All images here are © Paul Kirchner.

Kirchner's The Bus was serialized in Heavy Metal in the late 1970s and early 1980s, with a Ballantine Books collection in 1987. Now the French publisher Editions Tanibis revs up the surreal vehicle for another Bus tour. For slide show, go here. Tanibis says, "Our new edition will include some previously unpublished strips and illustrations, a postscript by Paul Kirchner and a new cover." Both French and English editions arrive next month.

2012-01-16T13:35:00.002-05:00

Pull my daisy
Tip my cup
All my doors are open
Cut my thoughts for coconuts
All my eggs are broken

Pull My Daisy
Pull My Daisy

Jack my Arden
Gate my shades
Woe my road is spoken
Silk my garden rose my days
Now my prayers awaken

In the shade love your made
In the shade pluck the day
Like a daisy

Bone my shadow
Dove my dream
Start my halo bleeding
Milk my mind and make me cream
Drink me when you`re ready

Dove my dream make me cream
Dove my dream

Hop my heart on
Harp my height
Seraphs hold me steady
Hip my angel
Hype my light
Lay it on the needy.

2012-01-15T16:26:00.000-05:00

Gene Deitch's The Hobbit (1966). For the "making of" story, go here.

Jack Kerouac's comic strip and paintings

2012-01-12T09:33:00.005-05:00

Jack Kerouac drew "Doctor Sax and the Deception of the Sea Shroud" in 1952 or 1953 to amuse Carolyn Cassady's children. Note "JK" initials in the first panel. "Brooklyn waterfront... Midnight!" There's a somewhat similar passage in the Dr. Sax novel.

Kerouac also did religious themed paintings, including Buddhas and Popes. Below is his 1966 collaboration with the Italian painter Franco Angeli depicting Jesus being taken from the cross. Douglas Brinkley, editor of Jack Kerouac: Road Novels, 1957-1960, said that when Kerouac "rediscovered his Catholic heritage, he embraced the iconography, drawing crucifixes and rosaries in his notebooks... Kerouac embraced the pageantry of Catholicism... There is no blasphemy in Kerouac.”

2012-01-11T10:36:00.001-05:00

Illustrations by Frederick Richardson and other lost art is found at Lost Art Books.

Mike Rhode's Washington City Paper interview with Joe Procopio, publisher of Lost Art Books.

2012-01-04T20:35:00.003-05:00

Jack Kerouac writing to Marlon Brando in 1957.

Scheduled for May 2012 release, On the Road reunites writer José Rivera and director Walter Salles, who previously teamed for the award-winning The Motorcycle Diaries (2004). Sam Riley (Sal Paradise) and Garrett Hedlund (Dean Moriarty) head the cast that features Kristen Stewart (Mary Lou) and Kirsten Dunst (Camille). Tom Sturridge plays Carlo Marx, the character Kerouac based on Allen Ginsberg. Viggo Mortensen portrays Old Bull Lee, based on William Burroughs. Amy Adams is Jane, based on Joan Vollmer Burroughs (who was killed by Burroughs in a drunken 1951 gun accident). Also in the cast: Steve Buscemi, Terrence Howard and Elisabeth Moss. Coati Mundi plays Slim Gaillard.

2012-01-03T12:56:00.002-05:00

Above: Jean Giraud (Moebius) draws Blueberry.

Below: Giraud, Joe Kubert and Neal Adams jam in 1972 on the French television series Tac au Tac. Click labels at bottom for more art by all three.

2012-01-02T11:57:00.006-05:00

Al Capp's L'il Abner came to an end on November 13, 1977, and Capp died two years later. Syndicated reprints of Li'l Abner in 1988-89 were followed by a 1989 revival of Walt Kelly's Pogo.

These are sample strips for a planned 1990 revival of Li'l Abner that never happened. The artwork is by Steve Stiles, and as evident here, he did a stellar job in capturing Capp (with a few Bill Elder flourishes), faithful in all aspects from layouts to inking.

The writer was Norm Hochberg, who launched the project. His father was the lawyer of the Al Capp estate, and through him, Hochberg was able to get permission from Capp's widow and brother, Elliot Caplin, to resuscitate the strip. Hochberg asked Dennis Kitchen for suggestions on a suitable cartoonist.

Steve Stiles recalls: "I wasn't the only one contacted, but I don't know who the others were. I was given a script for a four-panel sequence involving Joe Btfsplk. There was a 'bake off' that was judged by five or six cartoonists, one of whom was Scott Shaw. After I was selected, I was supplied with a big stack of b/w Xeroxes of Li'l Abner for reference, and Dennis was kind enough to send me some of his reprint volumes gratis. The strip would have been distributed through the Southern United States, plus Latin and South American papers."

Steve continues: "As for the demise of the project, all this I got secondhand through Hochberg, so I don't know how true it is. Supposedly, with ten days before the contract was due to be signed, Capp's daughter, Julie, got wind of the project (I don't know where she was during all this) and talked her mother and uncle into withdrawing permission for the revival."

"I was 13 when I first decided to become a cartoonist. My father came to an undeniable conclusion: I had lost my mind. He stuck to that idea with barnacle-like tenacity, ignoring whatever project I was working on, regardless of subject matter. The only response I would invariably get was. 'If you have to do this kind of stuff, why don't you do something like Li'l Abner?' So you can imagine my feelings when, in 1990, I was offered the chance to draw a proposed revival of Li'l Abner."

"Dad had passed on by that time, but, whoa, what an opportunity for closure! On the other hand, Al Capp had shuffled off this mortal coil, too; if there is an afterlife, what sort of reception could I expect from Mr. Capp when it was my turn to trot through them Pearly Gates (or wherever)? Does The Afterlife have health insurance? I needn't have worried; after working up three weeks worth of daily Dogpatch continuity, the project went belly up for reasons beyond my control."

"Aside from the (pant, pant!) thrill of getting to draw Daisy Mae for three weeks, a major perk on that job was the ten years worth of Li'l Abner strips I was given for reference, providing me with many months of chortles, grins and guffaws. When it comes to comic strip laughs, Al Capp is *The Man*, bar none."

--Steve Stiles

For more by Steve (cartoons, illustrations, CD cover, comics), go here.

2011-12-31T08:24:00.002-05:00

From 1937 to 1956, Jackie Ormes (1911-1985) drew comics for two African-
American newspapers, the Pittsburgh Courier and the Chicago Defender.

Jackie Ormes is featured in this supergirls video set to "Mad Mama" (Jane Bowman, 1961).

2011-12-28T12:40:00.000-05:00

Harry J. Tuthill (1886–1957) drew the Bungles from 1918 to 1945. In 1924, he changed the title from Home Sweet Home to The Bungle Family.

He Won Success On A Bungle (Modern Mechanix, October 1936)

PLAYING the banjo for an itinerant medicine man might not be considered the ideal preparation for a career as a cartoonist, but that is the unconventional path to comic strip fame followed by Harry Tuthill, creator of the famous Bungle Family.

Tuthill actually bungled into fame, if we may be granted a play on words which is the license of every cartoonist. Harry Tuthill created The Bungle Family, and the family in turn went out and made him famous from coast to coast. Today, with the cartoon strip appearing in scores of daily newspapers throughout the United States, Tuthill is one of the best paid topnotchers of his profession.

Tuthill himself gives a good deal of the credit for his success to the unusual opportunities for observing human nature in action which came his way as banjoist, barker and working humorist for an old time medicine show. He had to play the banjo well enough to attract a crowd. He had to have a robust flow of humor to keep the crowd interested and put it in a buying mood. Certainly it was as exacting a school for a humorist as any cartoonist ever graduated from with a degree of D. H. N.—Doctor of Human Nature.

Tuthill’s “medical” employer specialized in corn cures, and the pair traveled in a covered wagon which visited most of the towns between the Adirondacks and the Rockies. As a covered wagon it was a weird and wonderful vehicle. Its exterior was plastered with agonizing signs which pictured in elaborate detail every misery the human foot is heir to. A far cry from those aching posters to the deft pen and ink drawings the young spieler was later to turn out!

The Bungle Family offers interesting sidelights on how a cartoon strip is developed. It didn’t start out to be the Bungle Family at all. It began, some 17 years ago, as Home Sweet Home when Tuthill got a job as cartoonist on the New York Evening Mail. But he had named his inkpot characters with an aptness worthy of a Dickens. Their vitality asserted itself and before very long the strip became The Bungle Family and so it has remained.

To the cartoonist just breaking into the game, or to the student interested in discovering just what, gives certain cartoon strips their phenomenal popularity, the Bungle Family is well worth studying. It is a leading exponent of what a critic might describe as a comedy of situation. Wisecracks and gags are conspicuously absent.

The situations are never fantastic. The troubles and successes of the Bungles are those which might reasonably occur to an average family.

Secondary characters are brought in as circumstances may require, but the spotlight always beats down upon the Bungles themselves—Colonel George B. Bungle, his wife Josephine, and his daughter Peggy. This is a secret known to every successful cartoonist—never let the center of interest shift from your heroes.

George B. Bungle, in many of his characteristics, reflects the secret yearnings of Tuthill himself. The Colonel, as thousands of Bungle fans are aware, is a troubled business man, a promoter, and something of an inventor. He comes by his inventive talents honestly, as a visitor to Tuthill’s studio soon discovers.

It is as much a home craftsman’s workshop as an artist’s studio. Half of it is given over to drawing boards, inkpots and pens which create the adventures of the Bungles from day to day. The other half is equipped with workbenches, wood lathes, turning tools, hacksaws and chisels in a profusion to delight the heart of a hobbyist.

Tuthill’s particular delight is tinkering with automobile engines. When the Bungle Family has trouble with its Scatterbolt Six, it is pretty safe to assume that Tuthill has just been taking one of his own cars apart and putting it together again. The hands which are so skilled with brush and pen are just as deft in operating upon a delicate piece of machinery. But all of Tuthill’s inventions issue through his brain child, George Bungle.

His workshop-studio occupies a building of its own at the rear of an old-fashioned house with many rooms, set back among the trees on his spacious estate in a suburb of St. Louis. Tuthill is one of the few first-rank cartoonists who lives in the middle west.

2011-12-20T09:56:00.010-05:00

Reed Crandall (1917-1982) was born in Winslow, Indiana, but grew up in Newton, Kansas. He did the Native American Art Triptych in 1933 while he was in Newton High School. The wooden sculpture Scrooge was created in 1936, the year after he graduated from high school. Newton's John Gaeddert did some recent restoration work on Scrooge.

Below are two illustrations from Edgar Rice Burroughs' John Carter of Mars, published in 1964 by Biblo & Tannen's Canaveral Press; both were reprinted in Castle of Frankenstein #5 (1964) to illustrate a Dick Lupoff article about Burroughs. The sword battle shows the attack of the Morgors, the skeleton men of Jupiter. Crandall also illustrated Tarzan and the Madman for Canaveral. "The Sucker" was published in Terror Illustrated #1 (December 1955), and "The Lipstick Killer" was in Shock Illustrated #2 (February 1956), titles in EC's short-lived Picto-Fiction line. For the true facts about the myth of the Lipstick Killer, click on the "lipstick killer" label at bottom.

2011-12-17T08:59:00.004-05:00

Russ Cochran announces a new 32-page monthly publication, The Sunday Funnies, devoted to classic comic strips. It features reprints of Gasoline Alley, Krazy Kat, Bronc Peeler, Little Nemo and other Sunday pages dating back to 1895 but mostly from the 1900s to the 1930s. The premiere issue features Gasoline Alley (the first ten Sunday pages from October 24 to December 26, 1920). Also: Alley Oop, Bronc Peeler, Krazy Kat, Wee Willie Winkie's World and Crazy Quilt (April 19, 1914), a strip by Frank King and five other artists with several storylines stitched together.

The source for this material is the Billy Ireland Cartoon Library & Museum, launched by Lucy Caswell and Milton Caniff at Ohio State in 1977. Cochran comments: "Each issue of The Sunday Funnies will be a full-size 22"x16" comic section, containing full-page Sunday comics in full color. These pages are coming from the archives of Ohio State University, which, thanks to Bill Blackbeard, has the largest and most comprehensive collection of Sunday comics in existence. The retail price will be $10 (plus $5 S/H for US or $7 S/H outside the US) and I will be selling subscriptions, 12 monthly issues for $100. My print runs for these historic sections will be low and I expect to sell out the first few issues, so get your order in now before it's too late. The first three issues of The Sunday Funnies are being printed at once, so send $30 plus $9 shipping ($21 outside US) to get these first three, or, if you believe in me, send $100 plus $25 shipping ($55 outside US) for a year's subscription. I promise you will be delighted... I discovered that there would be considerable economy in printing The Sunday Funnies three at a time, I realized that there would be similar economy in shipping them out three at a time, and that's the way I should be selling them... three at a time. So I am not offering single issues of The Sunday Funnies anymore, I'm selling them in groups of three, all to be mailed in a sturdy Calumet Carton at the same time. This means that now it is essentially a quarterly publication of three Sunday sections, each of 32 pages, for the retail price of $30 plus shipping ($9 US; $20 Outside US). I think this will work much better. As always, you can order through my web site, www.russcochran.com; or you can send your check to PO Box 469, West Plains MO 65775; or you can call 417-256-1311 if you prefer to use MasterCard, Visa or Discover. You can also make a payment by Paypal to russ@russcochran.com. If you want to be invoiced to pay by Paypal, just e-mail Judy atcomicart@russcochran.com."

December 6, 1936

July 21, 1940

January 2, 1944

Wood Chips #40: Mad #52 (January 1960)

2011-12-14T08:49:00.001-05:00

2011-12-13T08:45:00.000-05:00

2011-12-08T12:32:00.002-05:00

These comic book pages by Russ Manning (1929-1981), best known for his Tarzan comic strip and comic books, were drawn for the pressbook of the film Luana (1968).

April 9, 1976

2011-12-06T13:58:00.001-05:00

A selection of work by Darrell McClure (1903-1987), best known for his long run on the Little Annie Rooney comic strip from 1930 to 1966. His assistants on the strip were Bob Dunn and Fran Matera. Brandon Walsh drew the Sunday strip from 1931 to 1953. "Greetings" was a page from a Christmas promotional book King Features sent to newspapers in 1939.

Topps #14: Laugh-In

2011-12-03T11:09:00.001-05:00

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Of all the gags I ever devised for Topps, the interactive Yellow Pages card is my favorite. "Let your fingers do the walking" was an ad slogan so familiar that Advertising Age listed it in their top slogans of the century. When the two die-cut holes at the bottom of the card were punched out, fingers could be inserted to walk the card across a tabletop.

The Laugh-In television series was a huge hit, and these finger cards were part of Topps' licensed Laugh-In series in 1968. Woody Gelman called me into Larry Riley's office, and the three of us had a verbal gag session to generate cards and stickers relevant to the TV show. Jo Anne Worley (not Joanne) was presented as a loudmouth on the show; hence, the hole in mouth. Since Goldie Hawn rose to fame on Laugh-In as a sort of walking collage of painted messages, it's odd this finger card didn't feature more body art. I seem to recall there was also a card in which the finger became an elephant's trunk.

Advertising Age's top ten slogans of the century:

Diamonds are forever (DeBeers)
Just do it (Nike)
The pause that refreshes (Coca-Cola)
Tastes great, less filling (Miller Lite)
We try harder (Avis)
Good to the last drop (Maxwell House)
Breakfast of champions (Wheaties)
Does she ... or doesn't she? (Clairol)
When it rains it pours (Morton Salt)
Where's the beef? (Wendy's)

HONORABLE MENTIONS
Look Ma, no cavities! (Crest toothpaste)
Let your fingers do the walking (Yellow Pages)
Loose lips sink ships (public service)
M&Ms melt in your mouth, not in your hand (M&M candies)
We bring good things to life (General Electric)

2011-12-02T07:43:00.005-05:00

Jack Davis at the Scott Eder Gallery.

"Welcome to Texas"

"Bill Clinton and Newt Gingrich"

"Jack London"

2011-12-01T10:24:00.003-05:00

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Jack Rickard (1922-1983) is known for his Mad covers and his movie posters. But here's a jazz painting and other work by Rickard. Pauline McPeril was his 1966-67 comic strip with Mell Lazarus, who scripted under the pseudonym Fulton. Pauline was a secret agent. Note that Alfred E. Neuman and Lazarus' Miss Peach characters have walked into the Sunday strip. When Pauline McPeril came crashing down, Rickard drew himself and Lazarus at work.

1967

May 7, 1966

January 1, 1967

2011-11-27T18:24:00.000-05:00

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A selection of artwork by Tom Conroy, who recalls,"I turned 18 in 1960, so most of this stuff is when I was around 20 to 23, a lot of it when I was staying in Berkeley with Roger and Joel. I lost a lot of my old art work over the years."

2011-11-26T08:57:00.000-05:00

In 1946, newspaper editors received this limited edition book as a promotional gift from King Features Syndicate. With a Hal Foster cover, the slipcased hardcover presented Charles Dickens' "A Christmas Carol" in 160 pages with a gathering of King Features characters in the end papers.

2011-11-20T10:10:00.021-05:00

Two versions of Joel Beck's Odalisque

Joel Beck self-portrait (1987)

The cartoonist Joel Beck (1943-1999) was one of the founders of underground comics, having created Lenny of Laredo in 1965, followed by Marching Marvin and The Profit. In 1962, he was in New York, staying in Larry Ivie’s apartment, but Larry was out of town one week. In the Lower East Side, the Charles Theater on Avenue B was a neighborhood movie theater dating back to 1926. It became a focal point for underground films in the early 1960s because it ran Filmmaker’s Night once a week. I had been contacting filmmakers such as Ed Emshwiller and suggesting they bring in their 16mm films. I knew that Larry Ivie had been running around Central Park in a Superman costume for a short movie starring himself as Superman.

I spoke to Joel on the phone and told him to bring Larry’s film to the Charles. Joel was very reluctant to do this and said, “The splices are all Scotch tape.” Finally I talked him into it, and he turned up that evening with the film. When Walter Langsford, who owned the Charles, saw the Scotch tape splices, he was fearful of running it through the projector and did not put it on the program. However, later that night, after the audience had left, Langsford took the film up to the projection booth. I sat with Joel, Tom and a few others as we watched Larry’s film on the giant theater screen. The special effects involved a plastic Superman toy sliding down a wire attached to a tree. I can’t remember if Joel ever told Larry about the clandestine screening, but I somehow doubt it.

Tom Conroy picks up the story:

by Tom Conroy

I was the one who bought that plastic airplane in a toy store and rigged it all up with the pulleys so it would fly. I hooked it up with a string and it flew over one of the small coves of the Central Park Lake with rocks in the background while Larry filmed it. It was a seaplane with pontoons, and it had a cardboard cut out of Superman taped on one of the wings. It worked great and we only did one shot. I think it looked as good as anything Sam Katzman did. I remember jumping around on the rocks to set it all up, and Larry asked me if I would dress up in tights so I could star in his John Carter of Mars film. Bhob, Joel and I stood out there on Avenue B and laughed about it for at least an hour.

A little bit about Joel Beck when he came to NYC in 1962. This was my first year of doing my “beatnik thing”, so we would hang out all night long in Greenwich Village. Joel really liked the beat scene. and we both did a lot of artwork for some of the coffee houses. I still have a menu that he drew for the Cafe Wha on MacDougal Street. So one day I’m at Larry Ivie’s pad, and Joel was getting dressed so he could take his art portfolio around to the magazines hoping to get work. He had a suit jacket, vest, white shirt and a necktie, and he had them all pinned together with safety pins. These four items were now one solid piece all pinned together. He laid them on the bed with the necktie facing down, and then he crawled into them like a snake slithering into a rabbit hole. His arms went into the sleeves first, and then his head popped out at the top. He flipped over and sat up, buttoned the collar and tucked in the shirt tails, and he was now dressed. It was an amazing thing to see. “Well… I’m ready to go into the big city”. Joel considered Madison Avenue the “big city”. God made only one Joel Beck, and after that he threw away the mold.

Joel got kicked out of school when he was about 10 or 11 years old. Being a artist he was using the walls of the boys’ bathroom as his canvas. He was doing drawings of Mickey, Minnie, Donald and Daisy fucking. They let him back into school when he promised to not do any more artwork on school property.

When Roger Brand (1943-1985) and Joel were in high school they were “teenage drunks”. Joel had a car, and they did a lot of driving and drinking. I can’t even remember some of the stories he told me. Where did they get the booze? Was it from their dad? It seems even as a kid the booze was always a part of his life.

A story Roger told me about him and Joel when they were still in high school: Joel is going to pick up his girlfriend Carol Verlinden for a date. It is night time, and Roger hides in the back seat of the car. He lies down on the floor so that he can’t be seen. Joel picks up Carol, and they are cruising along, and Joel reaches his right arm around and puts it on Carol’s right shoulder. He squeezes her shoulder for a little bit and then drops his hand behind the seat and taps Roger. Roger then lifts his hand up and puts it on Carol’s shoulder. Joel then brings his hand back around and puts it on the steering wheel. He is now driving with both hands on the wheel, and Roger is squeezing Carol’s shoulder. After a block or two, it dawns on Carol that Joel now has three hands, and she flips out. This is why I liked these two guys. Their brains operated at a different frequency than most people.

This is another story Roger told me. It is the early 1960s, and he and Joel are at a beer bash in Berkeley. It gets loud so someone calls the cops. The police give Roger and Joel a quick pat down and put them in the back of a police car. At this time Joel had this huge Jerry Lee Lewis pompadour hairdo. They had some Dexadrine pills on them and didn’t know what to do with them. Joel takes the pills and starts sticking them in his hair. When the cops get them and the other partygoers to the police station they strip search everybody and throw them all into this big jail cell. Joel sits down and starts shaking out his hair. The pills all land on the floor. They pass out the pills to their friends, and everyone sits there all night stoned on speed. The cops let them go the next day.

This is the early years… 1963-64. Through some strange chain of events, Roger and Joel ended up living in a garage. You know, like where you keep your car in the suburbs. Of course, there was no toilet. They had this huge vase that they used as a urinal. It was about four or five feet tall. Thin at the top and round at the bottom like a turnip. When they needed to take a leak they would climb up on a footstool and pee into the vase.

Knowing how much drinking they were doing, they probably were doing a lot of pissing. Somebody ratted them out, so after a while the city served them with an eviction notice. Be out by so and so day. So they call some friends to help them move. On moving day, a cop car is there, and their friends show up with a pick-up truck and another car. The street is lined with all the neighbors watching the event. You know, these are all straight clean-cut citizen types. One of their buddies who is this big strong joke football-type guy picks up the piss vase and carries it out to the street. Roger and Joel start saying to the guy “Easy. Easy. Careful. Watch out. Take it easy”. The guy sets it down on the street. and the bottom breaks out. Now this is on an incline, and the piss starts flowing down the street. All the citizens start gagging and wretching… end of story.

In 1983, I was 40 years old. Carole came to NY to run the photo agency. I hitched out to New Mexico to team up with my friend Milt, who I knew from my old beatnik days. Milt was the guy that Janis Joplin shared an apartment with the first month she was in San Francisco. They were not lovers. Milt and I jumped a freight train that took us into Barstow, California. From there we hitched up to see Roger and also an old friend of Milt’s.

Joel, Tom and Roger

A friend of Carole’s loaned us a car, and we headed over to Point Richmond to find Roger. We went from bar to bar until we found Joel. He made a couple of phone calls, and about ten minutes later Roger showed up. He looked a little worse for wear, but it was really good to see him.

When Joel saw that we had some wheels it was decided that we all would go on a mission. That mission was a trip to Rip Off Press so Joel could deliver some pages of artwork. At this time, Milt and I both had cameras, so I took some photos.

I remember so well the drive across the Bay Bridge and us just doing nothing but laughing and laughing. Roger was funny, but Joel was even funnier. It was a great trip. When Joel was outside of Point Richmond he was like a fish out of water, so we headed back. We dropped him off and came back into town with Roger and stayed at Carole’s pad with her brother. The next day we’re driving around, and a cop pulled Milt over for an “illegal lane change”. He searches the car and checks our ID and finds out that Roger has an arrest warrant for “failure to appear”. It was for some two-bit thing like jaywalking, open container or farting in an elevator. Roger gets handcuffed and hauled off to jail.

This was one of the few times I was on the road and had a lot of money on me. This was the weekend, and it took a day or two of running around to get Roger bailed out. The fine was $100, which we paid, and they cut him loose. I have never seen Roger more happy than that day when he came walking out of the slammer. We hung out in Point Richmond for a few more days, then headed up to the Russian River to see Milt’s friend. We hung there for awhile and then came back to Point Richmond. Milt really liked being with Roger and Joel. Milt was also a drinker.

Roger knew this old couple that we visited with. They were old beatniks from the 1950s and had great stories to tell about Frisco in the days before me and Milt made the scene. They had a Robert Crumb drawing that was framed and hanging on the wall. They liked underground comics, and Roger was like a guest of honor whenever he stopped in. One of the local bars still had an old faded poster of the nude Daisy Duck painting that Joel had done. He pointed at it and said, “Do you remember that one?” Then he chuckled, “The money I made off that paid my rent for three years”.

About a year earlier, Joel had gotten mugged one night and had his head split open with a lead pipe. He stumbled around town for a few hours before somebody took him to a hospital. Because of the injury, a lot of his memories were a little scrambled. He would talk about stuff we had done when he came to New York in 1962, and he had a lot of stuff mixed up. Also his memories of the time in LA with him and Roger were jumbled. I know it was head injury, not the booze.

I’m not sure who Roger was staying with, but he was homeless. Some chick said she would rent him a room at her place for $40.00 a month, so before we left I gave her the bucks for two months. I sent her money for a couple months after I got back to New York, but I think it was Joel or Paul that called and said she threw him out, so I stopped sending money. Even the sad shape Roger was in, he had not changed. His essence, his inner being was still the same as when he was young. Any time I spent with Roger was a good time, and Joel being there made it even better. Those guys were two of the best people I have ever known. I did the “Live fast and die young” thing for 20 years. I failed at it. Roger succeeded.

--Article and photos © 2011 Tom Conroy

Spouts (2010)

Above is a page from the Phil Howe/Joel Beck children's book Spouts, created 20 years ago but finally published last year. For much more about Joel and his artwork, go here. The San Francisco Chronicle ran this Kevin Fagan article about the search for Joel Beck's daughter.

Tom Conroy at a Mojave Desert freight train crossing in 1983.

Since the 1960s, Tom Conroy has run a picture rental agency, Movie Still Archives.

2011-11-18T18:10:00.004-05:00

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Ahmad Jamal's autobiography is forthcoming. Jamal had a huge hit with "Poinciana" in 1958, and it became his signature song. In 1998 he performed "Poinciana" at the Poland Jazz Fair with Othello Molineaux on the steel drum. Since this video has very good resolution, it's best at full volume and full screen. Stanley Crouch explains how Jamal could "turn an individual piece into an idiomatic symphonette" and notes his influence on pianists.

With restored audio, here's Jamal doing "Darn That Dream" in 1959.

Fake news / Real ad

2011-11-16T11:52:00.001-05:00

2011-11-13T18:08:00.001-05:00

Set in 1956, Dennis Potter's Lipstick on Your Collar (1993) features Ewan McGregor (his first major role) and Louise Germaine lip-synching Mickey and Sylvia's "Love Is Strange".

Topps #13: Like sands through the hourglass, so are the Days of Our Lives.

2011-11-05T07:46:00.021-04:00

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This is a photo I took of Art Spiegelman in 1969 when we worked together in Brooklyn creating humor products for Topps Chewing Gum. That's the interior of the Topps Product Development Department out of focus in the background. Photo © 2011 Bhob Stewart.

One day Art told me he had been reading vintage comic strips at the New York Public Library. The memory of that returned some years later when a research project had me studying turn-of-the-century Hearst newspaper comic strips on microfilm. I was surprised to see so many strips that went unmentioned in books about comics. Unlike modern comics, they mostly had a flat look with panel layouts often characterized by full figures in large panels not unlike a stage proscenium.

Looking through Gothic Blimp Works #2 (1969) recently, I reread Art's "Grain of Sand Comix" and realized he had drawn it in the style of those early strips. I asked him to write a few paragraphs about the creation of "Grain of Sand", and he responded with the article below. Tiny images and words are embedded in the background patterns, and these are not readable here even when the page is enlarged. Apparently Blogger has a size limit, so I've added a detail at the end of the article to show the miniature messages. For Publishers Weekly's recent (10/11) Art Spiegelman interview, go here.

Small Bits of Infinity

by Art Spiegelman

"Grain of Sand" was part of my apprenticeship as an underground cartoonist, a way to combine my love for old newspaper comics with a stab at making it all contempo by grafting some taboo subject matter onto the old form. A full broadsheet page in the centerfold of the Gothic Blimp Works was a strong lure, and I gave the page everything I had (which at that time was not much more than giving it hours of fine-line Rapidograph patterning). I wish I'd had the stamina and focus to explore “Festoria” further, instead of just making a one-shot teaser, but there were drugs to take and communes to join. Hey, it was the late 1960s, and I was 21.

My interest in old newspaper comics took root with the few tantalizing glimpses of a mysterious past that I found in Stephen Becker's Comic Art in America (1959), given to me as a birthday gift when I turned 12. I wanted to see more than the handful of black-and-white samples in that book and started logging serious after-school time among the bound newspaper volumes still somewhat available in some libraries back then—first exploring the main branch of the Queens library that I could reach by bike and later in the Manhattan library's newspaper annex far west of those lions on Fifth Avenue. Mostly I looked at the papers from the 1920s through the 1940s.

It's amazing to think how haphazard all my old comics spelunking was back then—I had a vivid enough imagination but just couldn't imagine a world bursting with volumes that would reprint vast swaths of Krazy Kat, Captain Easy or Dick Tracy. And books like the sumptuous Forgotten Fantasies or the full-size color Nemo books that Peter Maresca's Sunday Press has published in the past few years were on the farthest side of unimaginable. On the other hand, wresting comics history out of odd crevices made it all seem hard-won and urgent in a way that can’t be replicated when all things seem a keyboard click away. I didn’t really discover much of the first decade or so of very old Sunday funnies until Woody Gelman at Topps Gum took me under his wing in 1967. He first met me as a 15-year-old looking to score some original Jack Davis cartoon art to study. I “traded” him a copy of my imitation Mad crudzine, Blasé... and he saved it, writing me three years later—right after I graduated high school—to offer me a job at Topps that I kept for about 20 years.

I think Woody and I bonded over our interest in old comics: he hadn’t met too many 15-year-olds who knew what Little Nemo was. Woody seemed to be the only person on the planet who deeply cared about those old strips and valued them enough to archive them in his suburban basement filled to bursting with old paper. Woody was a visionary and a central figure in my life. He introduced me (and eventually the rest of the world) to Little Nemo in a really big way when he'd let me fall asleep in his Long Island basement surrounded by old Sunday pages.   

One of the singular aspects of those earliest newspaper pages—aside from their scale and the care given to the still-new technology of color separation—was the fact that the artists' "camera" viewpoint in those early pages wasn’t... cinematic. None of those Orson Welles angles or quick cuts that came with the comic books. Just full figures moving from panel to panel as if striding across a vaudeville stage. My "Grain of Sand" page echoed that structure as well as the approach to page structure that thought of each page as a coherent unit. Thanks to Woody’s collection I got to see the World (and the Journal and the Herald) in a grain of sand, and had the good fortune to hold small bits of infinity in the palm of my hand.

A few years later I did another obscure newspaper strip, "Skeeter Grant". It was commissioned by my pal Willy Murphy, a fine San Francisco underground cartoonist who, like Roger Brand, died before his cartooning mission was fully accomplished. He was editing the comics supplement for a short-lived San Francisco weekly folly called The Sunday Paper... and the chance to work in color was as big a lure in 1972 as the chance to work broadsheet size had been when I was offered the centerfold of the Gothic Blimp. The strip I did there was based on a real dream I'd had in Woody's basement.
--© 2011 Art Spiegelman

Enlarge detail to see hidden mini-messages.

The Sunday Paper (1972)

"Skeeter Grant" © 2011 Art Spiegelman

2011-11-01T10:12:00.028-04:00

Bernard Krigstein's colorful book jacket painting for Richard Condon's The Manchurian Candidate first edition hardcover (McGraw-Hill, 1959) resurfaced in this advance cover comp for the forthcoming biography by Greg Sadowski. Note these are actually two different paintings, with alterations in color and placement of figures. Curiously, the painting not used for Condon's novel is obviously more vibrant.

The Sadowski book, due in 2013, is a continuation of his earlier B. Krigstein (Fantagraphics, 2002), which was followed by B. Krigstein: Comics (2004). Reviewing the latter, Publishers Weekly noted, "Famed as one of the great innovators in comics history, Krigstein was one of the first cartoonists to consciously experiment with pacing and layout for psychological effect."

Krigstein illustration for Boy's Life (October 1963)

Above is Pepper Young's Family, Krigstein's unsold 1950 comic strip adapted from Elaine Carrington's long-run radio soap opera. I first wrote an essay about Krigstein's work in 1954. Below are the front and back covers of an interview John Benson and I did with Krigstein 48 years ago. Krigstein lived in Jamiaca, Queens, and we recorded the interview there on August 16, 1962. It was mimeographed in 1963 with no interior illustrations. As far as I know, this 27-page interview was the first extended Q&A interview with a comic book artist ever published.

Incredible Science Fiction #30 (1955)

Weird Fantasy #8 (1951)

Real-Life Horror #5: High-rise Terrors

2011-10-30T15:38:00.009-04:00

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When I worked at TV Guide in the early 1960s, I was on the 28th floor of the Sperry-Rand Building (at 1290 Sixth Avenue). The CBS building had just been constructed across the street. It was nicknamed Black Rock because the building was clad in unpolished Canadian black granite. One day I looked out the window and saw a small crack in the granite on the 27th floor. Some days later, I noticed it had widened. Just when I was beginning to wonder if I should report my observations, a scaffold was lowered, and three guys in suits and ties nervously climbed out a window, making a scary transfer to the scaffold. Later, a huge metal bolt was put in the crack, maybe to keep granite from falling to the street. Exactly how the final repair was accomplished I never knew. Years later, I learned that certain sidewalks in Manhattan have temporary coverings not because construction is underway but because pieces of buildings are falling off.

There were only three offices on the 28th floor: TV Guide, Martin Ransohoff Productions and Jac Holzman's Elektra Records, with its subsidiaries Nonesuch Records and Nonesuch Films. One day I asked Holzman what films Nonesuch Films had made, and he said, "Nonesuch." When some kind of construction work was going on inside Elektra, I heard an odd sound, turned and saw a drill coming through the wall toward my head. I backed away.

Around the corner from the elevators was a door that obviously did not lead to Ransohoff, Elektra or TV Guide. I became curious, and one day I turned the doorknob, realized it was unlocked, opened the door and gasped in amazement.

The door opened into a gigantic airshaft about 30 feet across. I stepped out onto a tiny platform with a waist-high railing. With one hand I clutched the railing. I was standing inside the airshaft, and I took care not to let the door close behind me, keeping my other hand on the doorknob. What if it closed... and then locked? In retrospect, the situation looked like it could have been a scene from Die Hard. Wind swirled as I looked up toward the top of the building and down into darkness. There was nothing to see but other small platforms off in the distance. I stepped back inside and closed the door.

Every so often I recalled the moment of standing on that tiny ledge inside the immense interior. It had been like stepping into an alternate world from the brightly lit hallway. No one else ever seemed interested in the door, even when I described what I had seen. When the coffee cart rolled from the elevator, we stood in line in the hallway, and I would glance at the door, knowing the world beyond. I was haunted by that memory, and a month later, I opened the door again. This time was different. The wind was much stronger. Holding the door, I stepped out with only one foot. The intensity of the wind was such that I wondered if I could be suddenly sucked into the airshaft. With that fearful thought, I quickly stepped back into the hallway and never opened the door again.

Wood Chips #39: Roger Brand

2011-10-27T00:09:00.005-04:00

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Kim Deitch's recent very moving writing about Roger Brand has stirred a lot of comments, with people posting their own memories of Roger. It all brings back those long ago days and nights of creative jaunts at drawing boards all over Manhattan. You can read Kim's memoir and the remarkable comments it triggered here.

This prompted me to recall my own meeting with Roger when he drew one of my scripts for Jungle Jim #22 (February 1969), following my layouts. This was actually written by completing a script someone else at the Wood Studio had started and then abandoned. The four Jungle Jim stories I wrote for Wally Wood were penciled by Roger, Tom Palmer, Steve Ditko and (in a later issue) Pat Boyette. Of the four, this one is the weakest. The convoluted plot elements barely hang together, but Roger's considerable drawing skills keep the story from totally collapsing. I like the coloring effect of the pure white beam. Wally Wood inked, along with Roger, me and others in a group inking session at the Wood Studio in 1967. Bill Yoshida did the lettering.

For the rest of issue #22, visit Pappy's Golden Age.

2011-10-18T20:53:00.000-04:00

Chad Grothkopf (1914-2005) created the first television animated cartoon, the eight-minute Willie the Worm (1938), seen in a single frame at bottom. He created DC's Johnny Quick and Fawcett's Hoppy, the Marvel Bunny (1942), and he drew the Howdy Doody comic strip from 1950 to 1953. The Kean in the credit box is Edward Kean, who died last year in Michigan. Kean wrote 2000 episodes of the Howdy Doody TV series, created the show's theme song and coined the word "Kowabunga".

Willie the Worm (1938)

2011-10-18T12:52:00.005-04:00

Irving Phillips' The Strange World of Mr. Mum ran from 1958 to 1974. It was a daily panel which added a Sunday strip in 1960. As I recall, Mort Walker told Virgil Partch he could get him a syndicated gig. VIP told Walker he was doing fine with gag cartoons in magazines. When the magazine markets began to dry up, Partch in 1960 prepared his cartoons as a newspaper feature, but the syndicate said, "We just bought this Mr. Mum, and one surreal cartoon is enough. Sorry." So instead of doing the type of imaginative cartoons that made him one of the leading 1940s cartoonists, Partch syndicated the suburban backyard Big George.

February 21, 1960

January 22, 1961

January 31, 1961

March 5, 1961

August 22, 1959

2011-10-13T08:29:00.001-04:00

Years before the creation of Henry, Carl Anderson did Herr Spiegleburger for the McClure Syndicate.

May 7, 1905

2011-10-08T13:54:00.001-04:00

Ray Smith, host of The Jazz Decades, tells his life story. Smith died February 26, 2010 at the age of 87. He first produced The Jazz Decades in 1958 for WKOX in Framingham, Massachusetts. He joined WGBH Boston in 1972 and over the next 38 years, he produced more than 1900 programs. Some can be heard here.

Wood Chips #38: The comic strip Christmas party and the real-life Andy Gump

2011-10-04T08:08:00.003-04:00

Wally Wood documented "The Comic Strip Characters Christmas Party" in Mad #68 (January 1962). Rex Morgan M.D. tells Dick Tracy about surgery on chinless Andy Gump. Morgan refers to the entire Gump family, a curious gag line since the others, apart from Andy, did have chins.

Ironically, there was a real-life Andy Gump who had surgery. This was Andy Wheat, born in 1890 in Bay St, Louis, Mississippi. He had an infected tooth that led to the removal of his entire lower jaw. After cartoonist Sidney Smith met Wheat through his brother, Dr. Thomas Smith, a dentist in Bloomington, Illinois, he decided to use Wheat as the basis for a comic strip character. Wheat was 27 when The Gumps debuted in newspapers in 1917. Later, he legally changed his name to Andy Gump. Note that he is dressed like Andy Gump in the photo below.

The word "gump" was introduced by James Russell Lowell in The Biglow Papers (1848).

February 12, 1917

May 31, 1924

2011-10-01T15:59:00.001-04:00

Mexican illustrator Miguel Covarrubias (1904-1957) did this panorama of 1930s network radio personalities for the May 1938 issue of Fortune. It's another in the Potrzebie series of images with key outline identification maps, joining our previous image maps of Galaxy Science Fiction authors, Superman vs. Ali and DC's Cosmic Teams trading cards. At bottom is Covarrubias' caricature of himself.

More early Ebert

2011-09-29T09:07:00.001-04:00

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More early 1960s Roger Ebert poems from Dick Lupoff's Xero, thanks to Robert Lichtman. "Snippets" has lips I clipped, but why didn't I make them red? I don't know. Steve Stiles illustrated "Kreegh-Kill!", and I did the drawing for "Next-to-Last Statement". I can't identify the illustrator of "Protection". Kent Moomaw was a well-known science fiction fan who was 18 years old when he committed suicide in 1958. For more about Moomaw, go here.

2011-09-28T09:06:00.005-04:00

Corentin Kopp's animated Rats Live on No Evil Star. The title is a palindrome. Very effective at full screen. For more on this Berlin band, see Discogs.

For more info, see Lallali and Pappy's Golden Age Comics.

Rats Live on No Evil Star
by Anne Sexton

A palindrome seen on the side of a barn in Ireland

After Adam broke his rib in two
and ate it for supper,
after Adam, from the waist up,
an old mother,
had begun to question the wonder
Eve was brought forth.
Eve came out of that rib like an angry bird.
She came forth like a bird that got loose
suddenly from its cage.
Out of the cage came Eve,
escaping, escaping.
She was clothed in her skin like the sun
and her ankles were not for sale.
God looked out through his tunnel
and was pleased.

Adam sat like a lawyer
and read the book of life.
Only his eyes were alive.
They did the work of a blast furnace.

Only later did Adam and Eve go galloping,
galloping into the apple.
They made the noise of the moon-chew
and let the juice fall down like tears.

Because of this same apple
Eve gave birth to the evilest of creatures
with its bellyful of dirt
and its hair seven inches long.
It had two eyes full of poison
and routine pointed teeth.
Thus Eve gave birth.
In this unnatural act
she gave birth to a rat.
It slid from her like a pearl.
It was ugly, of course,
but Eve did not know that
and when it died before its time
she placed its tiny body
on that piece of kindergarten called Star.

Now all us cursed ones falling out after
with our evil mouths and our worried eyes
die before our time
but do not go to some heaven, some hell
but are put on the Rat's Star
which is as wide as Asia
and as happy as a barbershop quartet.
We are put there beside the three thieves
for the lowest of us all
deserve to smile in eternity
like a watermelon.

Early Ebert

2011-09-25T21:07:00.011-04:00

Last week saw the publication of Roger Ebert's memoir, Life Itself, not to be confused with Elaine Dundy's memoir, Life Itself! (2001).

In the book, Ebert recalls his long ago interest in science fiction fanzines and writes, "I have always been convinced that the culture of fanzines contributed crucially to the formative culture of the early Web and generated models for websites and blogs. The very tone of the discourse is similar, and like fanzines, the Web took new word coinages, turned them into acronyms, and ran with them."

Here are some of Ebert's fanzine contributions, the poems "Contention" and "My Last Annish", both from Dick Lupoff's Xero (1960-63), which won a Hugo Award in 1963.

"Contention" is illustrated by Sylvia White, then the wife of writer-editor Ted White. For Xero's articles on comic books, Sylvia skillfully transferred comic book artwork to mimeograph stencils. As art director of Xero, I described to Larry Ivie how I wanted a drawing of Ted White standing next to his mimeo machine. Larry quickly did a pencil sketch which I later inked and then transferred to mimeo stencil. (Several people are currently trying to locate Larry Ivie. Does anyone know his whereabouts? His last known address was in Millbrae, California. Someone who went to his house recently reported it was empty.)

Metropolitan Mimeo was the name of Ted's shop on West 10th Street, where he produced fanzines along with occasional jobs from Greenwich Village locals during the early 1960s.

The copy of "My Last Annish" here is courtesy of Trap Door editor Robert Lichtman, who writes, "Roger seems to have had a lot of poetry published in various fanzines over the years, especially in Yandro (but also more appearances in Xero). He was a book reviewer for my first fanzine, Psi-Psi, from 1959 to 1961. His first nostalgia essay about his childhood Princess Theater appeared there, too. He published two issues of a dittoed fanzine, Stymie, circa 1959-60. I have the second issue--most contributions are by him." Ebert mentions both Stymie and Yandro in Life Itself.

To read Lichtman's Trap Door, go here.

Larry Ivie also did science fiction illustrations. Here's one illustrating Fred Saberhagen's "The Long Way Home" in Galaxy Science Fiction (June 1961).

2011-09-23T09:08:00.003-04:00

1933 Jerry Siegel/Joe Shuster fanzine

1935 newspaper strip proposal

2011-09-22T08:13:00.005-04:00

I scripted "Fright Pattern" in 1973 (as Jack Younger), and it was published in Haunt of Horror #4 (November 1974). I dictated the story to someone who took notes while we were riding on Amtrak, and later I typed the script from those notes.

Wayne Howard inked Syd Shores' pencils. This had to be one of the last jobs Shores ever worked on because he died June 3, 1973. (I was introduced to Wayne Howard several years earlier by an enthusiastic Wally Wood, who expressed his appreciation of Wayne's remarkable ability to draw like Wally Wood.)

The scarecrow dream was inspired by "4-Sided Triangle" in Shock SuspenStories #17, illustrated by Jack Kamen with a George Evans cover. (See at bottom.) Except for the "Fright Pattern" opening panels, the tight realism doesn't work with the dream sequences, so the Krigstein-styled nightmare atmospherics I had visualized are absent.

2011-09-21T06:30:00.002-04:00

2011-09-18T12:44:00.001-04:00

Caricature ©2011 Jim McDermott

Here's my 2004 interview with Rodney Dangerfield, which was for Publishers Weekly. I'm not sure, but I think this was his last interview before his death.

Rodney Dangerfield Interview

Did you find writing this book, It's Not Easy Bein' Me, a different experience than writing your comedy routines and screenplays?

Rodney Dangerfield: Completely. It was something that I fell into accidentally, you know what I mean? I was interviewed by someone one day, and I mentioned the depressed years. After that I get a couple of thousand answers on my e-mail, all commenting, "I'm depressed, too, Rodney." I thought to myself, that's a good idea for a book, maybe. Take a hundred people with depressed letters, how to cure themselves, this and that—and sell it. So I took it around to one company. I was writing, and I started to throw in stuff about myself, when I was a kid. After I did that for a while, and they read that, they told me to forget all about the letters with the depression, you know what I mean? Just write about yourself. It took me three years. That's not consistently. I did other things, too, but the book took three years to put together. [Laughs.] I'm new at this business. I don't know about books, but it's exciting to write something, and everyone seems to think it will be a winner.

You did write some joke books in the past, I Don't Get No Respect (1982) and No Respect (1995).

RD: Yeah, one was ridiculous, and the other one was also ridiculous. Just jokes, it didn't mean anything.

In Roger Ebert's review of Back to School [1986], which you coscripted and starred in, he compared you to Groucho Marx and W.C. Fields: "There was the sense that they were getting even for hurts so deep that all they could do was laugh about them. It's the same with Dangerfield." Do you agree?

RD: I can't say. I don't agree with him, so I agree with him.

You write that television killed nightclubs. What happened?

RD: Well, New York area—New Jersey, Bronx, Brooklyn, Staten Island, Manhattan—they had about 300 nightclubs going. These 300 nightclubs all employed acts, all kinds of acts: dancers, fire-eaters, you know what I mean? Then television came, and people wanted to stay at home. The box, that's it. All of a sudden, the nightclubs all started dying. No business. People stayed home and just watched TV. It got stronger and stronger, and there was no more sense in having nightclubs, it just killed them all—which is okay, what do I care? My father experienced the same thing in vaudeville. He did a vaudeville act for years, and then when talking pictures came in, that was the end of vaudeville. They wanted to go to the movies. So I experienced the same thing my old man did.

Of the many specialty acts that played those clubs, which was the strangest you recall?

RD: There were plenty of acts, going back 40 years here. The strangest one? I did a show when I was a kid up in Boston. There was a vaudeville house there, and in the show, one of the acts was the Shooting Mansfields. The act consisted of the mother, the father and their two kids shooting things from the stage. Before the show, they'd be in the basement rehearsing, shooting their guns. Another act I worked with was named Martha and Her Cello; she played the cello. These are the kind of acts I worked with. I worked with plenty of—not just singers—animal acts, too.

Is life the biggest joke of them all?

RD: I think it is. I once said to my old man, "You've done everything. So tell me, what's life all about?" He twirled his cigar and said, "It's all bullshit." That's what it is, Charlie, I'm telling you.

Listen to Drew Friedman on The Leonard Lopate Show (September 16, 2011).

Above is Stewie Stone on the cover of Friedman's Even More Jewish Comedians, published this month by Fantagraphics. The third and final volume in the series includes Mae Questel, Jean Carroll, Gertrude Berg, Richard Belzer, Gabe Kaplan, Professor Irwin Corey, Mel Blanc, Marty Ingels, Fyvush Finkel, Gary Morton, Sam Levenson, Bobby Remsen, Max Patkin, Marvin Kaplan, Norm Crosby, Sammy Shore, Joey Adams, Lou Jacobi and Sid James. Introduction by Jeffrey Ross.

Death of Newspapers #23: Stripped

2011-09-17T11:39:00.005-04:00

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Some of the 60 cartoonist interviews in Stripped discuss the end of newspapers.

This is the in-progress documentary by Dave Kellett and Fred Schroeder. For more clips, go here.

May 9, 1937

Death of Newspapers #22: Jan Eliot's Stone Soup

2011-09-12T10:35:00.008-04:00

In June, Stone Soup cartoonist Jan Eliot and voiceover performer JoJo Jensen experimented to create an audio comic strip. To experience this, use control-click to enlarge the strip above in a new window and then read along while listening at the Stone Soup blog.

Sarah Wagner interviewed Jan Eliot in 2008 for viz. Eliot objects to strip reruns and she discusses strip shrinkage: "The smaller the space, the less interesting the art, the less interested the reader, the less the newspaper cares, the smaller the space."

Below is an excellent Oregon Art Beat video of Jan Eliot and her teenage assistant Olive White working on Stone Soup. Watch full screen for close-ups of Eliot drawing. How come other cartoonists don't have informative videos with classy production values like this?

Wroten on the Wind

2011-09-08T10:49:00.005-04:00

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For Alex Jay's blog on creating logos and lettering, go here.

I wrote the article below about the Wroten Lettering studio and its important contribution to EC Comics for Russ Cochran's hardcover reprint of EC's M.D. (1988). Here it is with a few minor changes. Margaret Wroten's quote in the next-to-last paragraph was a surprising revelation, since until then no one had ever mentioned the existence of a Manhattan studio where EC freelancers could do work.

Wroten on the Wind

EC Comics used Leroy lettering by the husband-and-wife team of Jim and Margaret Wroten. On the Al Feldstein-edited titles the artists received pages minus layouts but with the Wrotens’ inked lettering already down on the boards.

Leroy lettering requires a collection of templates and a small handheld instrument, the scriber. An inked letter is produced by the penholder on one side of the scriber as the metal stylus on the other side follows the grooves in the template positioned an inch below.

EC’s extensive use of Leroy lettering, one suspects, derives as much from Bill Gaines‘ compulsion for neatness as it did from the reasons he offered in The Comics Journal #81 (May 1983): “My father, when he did Wonder Woman, and I have no idea why, used Leroy lettering… The older Wonder Womans were Leroy lettered by Jimmy Wroten, who started out as a salesman for Keuffel & Esser, who made, among other things, my slide rule. They were the big company for slide rules, for templates, for Leroy lettering. Leroy lettering mostly was used for lettering charts, engineering charts and so on, which it is beautiful for. How the hell it got involved in comics I don’t know, but it suited us very well because Al was a script-oriented person. Although he is an artist, and a pretty good one, when he started writing, he was more interested in the script than the art… Because Al used so many words, we found we could do it more clearly with Leroy lettering. If we had wanted a hand-letterer to work that small, to get all that copy in, it would have been very difficult for him. You’ll notice Kurtzman’s stuff has very light copy. He never liked Leroy lettering; he wanted the feel of the hand-lettering, so we used Ben Oda, a fine Japanese hand-letterer, who still works for DC and occasionally does something for us.”

While scripting directly on the boards used for the finished art, Feldstein penciled in the copy in a system advantageous for Wroten, as Gaines explained: “He would take his six, seven or eight sheets of paper, because we had a formula—it was either an eight, seven or six-page story. He’d take a ruler, rule out the panels, he’d letter right into the panels, he’d hold his lettering three lines down so the letterer could read what he was lettering, because he used Leroy lettering with templates, and he had to leave room for the template.”

Since all Feldstein-edited books, over a period of years, featured Leroy lettering, readers assumed Feldstein chose to use Leroy lettering as the ideal adjunct to his clean, crisp art technique, but in 1975, he told interviewer Ed Spiegel (Fanfare #1, Spring 1977) that this choice was not his preference: “I inherited that. When I joined Bill, they were already using it. I think it was a mistake. Harvey didn’t want any part of Leroy. But the fellow who did it for us, Jim Wroten, had this whole family arrangement, and we didn’t have the heart to take it away from them. Jim and his wife did it. We published all those years with it, and I think it made the books appear a bit static. But there’s another angle to examine, and that’s whether the heavy captions I did would have been harder to read without it. It’s not easy to sustain good lettering over a whole paragraph.”

M.D. #1: Joe Orlando art with Wroten lettering.

Jim and Margaret Wroten’s studio, Wroten Lettering, remained in operation for decades until Jim Wroten’s death in 1980. The couple, who first met in elementary school, grew up together in Baltimore. When I interviewed Margaret Wroten in 1986, she talked about the mid-1930s when Jim’s uncle helped him land a job at Keuffel & Esser in Morristown, New Jersey, leaving her in Baltimore. A year later, in 1937, they married. “Remember, it was the pit of the Depression,” she recalled. “You couldn’t get jobs. I had worked for the gas and electric company when he worked for Keuffel & Esser. I was just a housewife. He had been with them for about 18 months when we were married. Jim was about the best Leroy letterer around. He taught me how to do it. He demonstrated for Keuffel & Esser at different trade shows; that’s how he started doing it.”

He continued as a Keuffel & Esser salesman during World War II, exempt from military service because of his “confidential work for the government,” as she put it. Wroten Lettering began at the end of WWII when the couple, in 1945, joined William Moulton Marston (1893-1947) and others on the Wonder Woman team at 331 Madison Avenue.

“Jim quit Keuffel & Esser when we got our studio; he thought it would be a nice little business for the two of us to do together. Our studio was Doc Marston’s office. We were on the 12th floor. The art studio where Harry G. Peter worked was upstairs, right over us on the 13th floor. They had another artist, a girl named Arlene, who did backgrounds for him. Harry G. Peter was a nice old gentleman; he was just a nice person. We went out to Doc’s home several times, but after Doc died we never kept in touch with the rest of the family. He had an assistant who helped him write stories; her name was Joye Hummel. She married, and I think she’s down in Florida someplace.

Incredible Science Fiction #31: Wally Wood

“That’s how we started. We got started doing Wonder Woman, and through that we met Mr. Gaines [Max Gaines] and did work for him—because Doc Marston and Mr. Gaines were good friends. For Mr. Gaines we did Picture Stories from Science, the books on history and the story of The Bible. We worked on all of those.”

Wroten Lettering’s list of clients boomed in the post-WWII years. “We worked on EC Comics. We worked on Hillman Comics. And Victor Fox—we worked on some of his too. We did charts, and we did lettering on some romance magazines at 500 Fifth. At one time we had some help, but mostly it was just my husband and myself. I liked working with him, and I happened to like Leroy lettering. I think it’s a very fine kind of lettering."

In addition to the comic books, the Wrotens also lettered for comic strips—Bert Whitman’s syndicated Debbie Dean (1942-48) and Stan MacGovern’s antic angle on human behavior, Silly Milly (1939-50), which had little syndication but appeared in the featured slot at the top of the New York Post’s comics page. In Sinclair Lewis’ novel Bethel Merriday (1940) a character leaving New York remarks that they won’t miss the city except for Silly Milly. Once toasted in a “Stan MacGovern Night” at Leon & Eddie’s nightclub, the talented MacGovern became one of the more curiously neglected cartoonists of the 20th Century because his popular Silly Milly was never seen nationally. He abandoned cartooning in the 1950s, opened an unsuccessful East Rockaway, Long Island gift shop, and then worked at a Long Island furniture store. He was 72 when he committed suicide in 1975.

With the advent of EC’s New Trend, the Wrotens often worked evenings and weekends to keep pace with the ever-increasing number of words per page. “When we went into the horror comics, heck, the lettering on the horror comics practically took up half the panels. All you were getting was heads, a lot of heads. When we first got into the business, a survey was taken that said the concentration span of a child was very limited—and they said 35 to 40 words a page. Those you could turn out in 15 or 20 minutes. Bill Gaines was paying $2.50 a page. I’d count the words sometimes and find 400 to 500 words on a page. That’s a lot of words. The average way it used to be when comics were first done was with 35, 40 or 50 words a page, and you could do a page in 15 to 25 minutes or half an hour, depending on the words.; 400 to 500 words a page would take an hour or so. When it got so terribly heavy, I think we just reduced the size of the template. We had to go down to a #140 template, I think, because you couldn’t use a #175 with all those words on a page.

“We got it done. We always got it done. We worked night and day on those things. Many nights we stayed until nine o’clock to get something out that they needed the next day. We delivered and picked up our own work. This way we knew it got there; I don’t believe in that messenger stuff. Whenever they would finish the stories, they would give us a call; we would come down, pick up the work, do the lettering and take it back to them when it was done. We tried to proof everything before we sent it down. If Bill found a mistake or made a change, he would mark it off in blue in the margin, and then we would just correct it. Sometimes when there would be changes or he would want to do something else, we would put them on little strips, cut them to fit and put them on with rubber cement.” (This created a problem for reprints many years later when the rubber cement dried, and the tiny strips fell off.)

This exchange of pick-ups and deliveries kept the Wrotens actively involved with EC, since the procedure often necessitated traveling downtown to EC’s office three or four times a week. The Wrotens saw the EC artists not only at the annual EC Christmas parties but also in the course of their work, since the deadline pace occasionally required the artists to go to 331 Madison. “We just had one big room. It was a small office, but it was large enough for three boards. If they didn’t finish something, or if they wanted to make a last-minute correction, they could do that. Once in a while they would stop in and pick up work from us. If they needed to make a correction, we had pens and ink they could use. This didn’t go on all the time. This was just if they wanted to to do something quick or change something. Lots of time they would even bring up the work. Jack Davis used to come in, and Wood came in. We always had an extra drawing board, and they could sit down and do whatever they wanted to do.

“Bill had very good artists. We always got comic books. I had loads and loads of them. I gave them away. I shouldn’t have, should I? The last comic books we did were for EC, and then Jimmy just got out of it. He went into doing charts, badge cards, formulas for chemical houses and floor plans for trade shows all over the country. We sublet part of the studio during the 1960s. I gave up the studio after he passed on six years ago.”

Topps #12: Wacky Packages statue

2011-09-07T09:56:00.002-04:00

A series of Wacky Packages statues was proposed three years ago, and this seven-inch Dr Popper statue, based on the 1974 Wacky Packages sticker, was created as a prototype. However, the licensing deal fell through, and the series never happened. Only three of these Dr Popper prototypes were made. The statue is quite faithful to the original sticker, capturing correct colors and such details as the teeth and wrinkles in the glove.

The name Dr Pepper is often written incorrectly with a period. During the 1950s, the soft drink's logo was redesigned with an italic. The slant caused the period in "Dr." to look like "Di:", so the period was dropped from the logo and eventually from all company documents. The 1970s logo can be seen on the bottle at left.

Click "topps" in label below to see earlier posts about Topps.

2011-09-06T09:58:00.007-04:00

Here are two pages from Gothic Blimp Works #2 (1969). Above is an ad for an Allen Ginsberg LP on Douglas Records with artwork by John Thompson, who briefly lived in New York in 1969. Scroll to the bottom for Thompson's background on the creation of this ad.

Below is another of my Gothic Blimp collaborations with Larry Hama. Ron Haydock wrote the page, and I inked Larry's pencils. Haydock, screenwriter for Ray Dennis Steckler, also arrived in New York in 1969, and he wound up crashing at my West 12th Street apartment. He seemed in a near catatonic state. Since he had no money, no job and was incapable of contributing to the rent, I suggested he begin scripting. I would leave each morning to work in the Product Development department at Topps Chewing Gum in Brooklyn, and when I came back in the evening, Ron would show me what he had written. Two of these were scripts for stories I packaged as finished art and sold to Jim Warren for Creepy: "Valley of the Vampires" (#28) and "Spellbound" (#29).

Ron soon returned to the West Coast, and in 1977, after a failed attempt to raise some cash by selling a script to Steckler, he was killed by an 18-wheeler while hitchhiking back to LA from Vegas. Miriam Linna, who interviewed me about Ron in 1990, has written extensively about his career as a writer and rock musician in Sin-a-Rama and elsewhere. Her Norton Records label offers a CD compilation of his recordings, 99 Chicks: Ron Haydock and the Boppers.

John Thompson recalls: "In the Oxford University Press History of Berkeley in the Sixties, I'm mentioned as one of the two leading graphic artists in that Scene. In the Summer of Love 1967, at 21, I graduated in Art History from UC and found myself at the center of a countercultural whirlwind. Thus, I'm also mentioned in The History of the Haight Ashbury with those poster artists, though I was part of a group of aspiring poets in Berkeley.

"During the next couple of years, Ginsberg and his lover Peter were often a strong part of that scene. But my favorite poet/artist was Daniel Moore, who was close to Allen (to see his writing and art google danielmoorepoetry.com). So that's how I met Allen and saw him at EVO in 1968 and again when I lived near EVO in 1969. As much as I enjoyed 'some' of Allen's poetry, he was taking too many drugs at that time and was a sex addict. So because I was good looking with long, long hair, he often hit on Lin and I and tried to get us high. Aside from that aspect of his crazy persona, he was very kind to me.

"Allen and I knew record producer Alan Douglas (later Jimi Hendrix producer), so Allen sang some songs of William Blake's for me. I was a Blake scholar, so Allen's jubiliant over-the-top voice didnt really capture Blake's intentions. Nonetheless, Alan and Allen asked me to design, pencil and ink art to promote their album. They liked the compostion I penciled, but I inked Allen's profile that resemble his profile and beard and glasses but made his skin look older (because at my age Allen seemed like some old guy).

"Thus, Douglas liked it, but Allen was troubled that his profile didnt look younger and cuter. Douglas paid $100 to me to use it on the back page of EVO (or Gothic Blimp), and it would take several pages to decode the symbolism in that image."

Death of Newspapers #21: Bela Zaboly

2011-08-31T19:46:00.005-04:00

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In 1929, E.C. Segar introduced Popeye in his Thimble Theatre comic strip. After Segar died of leukemia in 1938, the Popeye strip was scripted by Tom Sims, who lived in Ohatchee, Alabama. Doc Winner (1884-1956), who worked in the King Features bullpen, illustrated the strip until the 1938 arrival of Bela Zaboly, aka Bill Zaboly (1910-1985). Sims and Zaboly teamed on the strip from 1938 to 1955. Zaboly continued until 1958 when Bud Sagendorf (1915-1994) took over. The current run of the strip consists of Sagendorf reprints.

Zaboly also continued Segar's Sappo topper strip. For more Sappo, go to Stripper's Guide. Zaboly's illustrated signature used the initials "BZ" with the "B" formed by the wings of a bee.

December 2, 1951

July 1, 1947

In 1941, Zaboly gave demonstrations

and showed students how to draw Popeye.

Death of Newspapers #20: Jimmy Murphy

2011-08-29T10:32:00.007-04:00

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Here's how King Features introduced Jimmy Murphy's Toots and Casper in July 1919 to newspaper editors in Editor & Publisher. The strip began seven months earlier in Hearst's New York American.

The Sunday strip began July 1920.

August 17, 1930

(l to r) Jimmy Murphy, William Randolph Hearst,
Rube Goldberg and George McManus lunch at
Los Angeles' Ambassador Hotel in the late 1930s.

June 22, 1930

Bud Duncan as Casper in Smile, Buttercup, Smile (1929)

2011-08-27T00:16:00.003-04:00

Malcolm Gladwell: "Xerox PARC, Apple, and the Creation of the Mouse"

2011-08-21T20:56:00.004-04:00

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This is a page Larry Hama and I did in 1969 for Gothic Blimp Works #4, an issue I co-edited with Kim Deitch. There's a curiosity in panel eight. I pasted in a reduction of a Topps poster, "Wanted for Highway Robbery: TV Repairman", but only now do I notice that the Jack Davis cartoon of the repairman appears to be blacked over. Strange. But a lot of strange things were happening in 1969.

I asked Larry to identify the person in the fourth panel and anything else he recalled about our collaborations. Larry responded, "I can barely remember stuff I worked on 20 years ago, let alone stuff I did 40+ years ago! I also haven't seen those pages in probably more than 35 years. People from Marvel and DC are always calling me to ask about stuff I worked on in the 1970s and early 1980s, and 75% of the time I can't help them at all. But the guy in panel four is definitely the guitarist from Country Joe and the Fish. I think the pic I copied is on the back of Electric Music for the Mind and Body."

Actually, as we see below, it's David Cohen on the back of their second album, I-Feel-Like-I'm-Fixin'-to-Die.

2011-08-18T11:11:00.004-04:00

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In the world of Gus Edson's The Gumps, people could actually read The Gumps, as evident in the first panel when seen enlarged. But it raises a few questions. Had Min, week after week, read her own life story?

In the next to last panel, Edson curiously confused the gag. He could have moved the characters to the left so that the sign would not have been in Andy's sightline. If he could so easily read the sign, then no need for him to run to the optometrist.

This Sunday strip is from January 23, 1955. For a few earlier Gumps, click on the labels at bottom. All 20th century radio-TV situation comedies can be traced back to The Gumps. It was the basis for the radio series Freeman Gosden and Charles Correll developed as Amos 'n' Andy, such a success that it became the prototype for radio comedies and soap operas. Elizabeth McLeod has written extensively on this strip-to-radio evolution which can be read here. (Wait for page to load.)

Created by Sidney Smith, The Gumps began February 12, 1917. Here's how it looked on March 8, 1925. In 1922, when he signed a new contract with the Chicago Tribune, he was given a Rolls Royce (see ad below). Smith died October 20, 1935, in a head-on collision.

Topps #11: More Wacky Packages

2011-08-15T12:57:00.001-04:00

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Here's another of my Wacky Packages gags, showing rough, finish and original product. This is from the third Wacky Packages series (1973). The name Windchester actually doesn't make much sense, humor or otherwise. Woundchester would have been a much better name, but I doubt it would have been accepted; notice the editorial change to my original copy.

Come back, Johnny Horizon, we hardly knew ye.

2011-08-14T09:38:00.002-04:00

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Johnny Horizon arrived in 1968 as the spokesman for the Bureau of Land Management. In 1976, he put on his backpack and vanished into the sunset. But why? The answer is here.

Burl Ives and Arthur Godfrey at 1970 Johnny Horizon rally before Lincoln Memorial.

Bill Gaines in the Statue of Liberty's arm

2011-08-11T09:15:00.006-04:00

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Annie Gaines took this photo of Bill Gaines stuck inside the arm of the Statue of Liberty. Only DeBartolo and Annie Gaines made it all the way to the torch balcony. However, being atop the torch platform, rocking gently in the wind, was so terrifying that they stayed less than a minute.

In his book Good Days and Mad, DeBartolo described how all three traveled one night to Liberty Island in DeBartolo's boat and then made the climb. This photo is part of a Life.com slide show on Mad which you can see here. Since the arm was closed to tourists, how did DeBartolo pull this off? He explains how he made the connection here.

Mad editor John Ficarra recalled: "This is Bill stuck in the Statue of Liberty. He was a huge Statue of Liberty fan. In fact, he owned the world's premiere collection of Statue of Liberty paraphernalia. He owned the original molds by Bartholdi. Dick DeBartolo talked to the guy who was the night watchmen at the statue and arranged for a group to have a private night tour. Bill had some trouble on those narrow stairs. The weird thing? I think that jacket he's wearing in the picture is the jacket he wore the day he died. He was not noted for his haberdashery."

Between 1876 and 1882, the Statue of Liberty arm was in Madison Square Park for fund-raising to complete the Statue. Anyone could pay 50 cents to climb to the torch balcony.

Chris Landreth The Spine

2011-08-07T17:37:00.003-04:00

Dashcam video of Japanese tsunami

2011-08-06T02:08:00.002-04:00

Wood Chips 37: Rough to finish

2011-08-03T22:07:00.004-04:00

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Wood times four, the bottom ones inked by Dave Stevens.

The Tree of Life and Thomas Wilfred

2011-07-31T09:14:00.005-04:00

Opus 161

Terrence Malick's The Tree of Life uses portions of Thomas Wilfred's Lumia Opus 161 (1965-66) at the beginning and end. A good reason to revive my history of Wilfred, the Lumia and various color organs. Here it is, as published in the September 1980 issue of Heavy Metal. (A portion of this column was reworked into my introduction for This Planet Is Doomed: The Science Fiction Poetry of Sun Ra, published this month by Miriam Linna's Kicks Books.) The green image on the first page is from Wilfred's Orientale: Opus 155. The comic strip spread across the other pages is Rock Opera by Rod Kierkegaard, Jr.

Also see Gregory Zinman's "Dept. of Optics: Lumia" in the June 27, 2011 issue of The New Yorker. Because of Malick there's now a renewed interest in Wilfred, who is no longer a forgotten figure.

Wood Chips 36: Galaxy Science Fiction

2011-07-27T09:24:00.000-04:00

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Two of Wood's Galaxy Science Fiction illustrations. Leonard Rubin's "Don't Look Now" (October 1958) and (bottom) Robert Sheckley's "Time Killer" (April 1960).

Born Dead, Still Weird

2011-07-26T13:00:00.002-04:00

Poster from Jack Davis' 1961 Yak Yak cover

2011-07-20T17:18:00.001-04:00

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For the ASIFA Animation Archive, go here.

First computer cartoon (1946)

2011-07-18T12:07:00.001-04:00

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Apart from science fictional drawings, this is believed to be the first cartoon about an existing computer. Drawn by Franklin Osborne Alexander for the Philadelphia Bulletin, it was published March 12, 1946, within the first month of the announcement of the ENIAC. It shows United States Treasury secretary John W. Snyder and two other men inspecting the ENIAC. The paper reads: "Umpty-ump hundreds of wage-price ratios." During the 1950s, George Lichty drew dozens of computer cartoons for his syndicated Grin and Bear It.

Top Secret Rosies Trailer from LeAnn Erickson on Vimeo.

"Stardust" Desmond and Brubeck (1953)

2011-07-15T09:11:00.000-04:00

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Buried in the Fantasy vaults for 50 years.

2011-07-08T08:39:00.002-04:00

Winsor McCay began drawing Dream of the Rarebit Fiend in 1904.

Winsor McCay and His Moving Comics (1911)

Wood Chips 35: Gilbert Ortiz again

2011-06-29T09:13:00.002-04:00

Below is another Daniel Clowes interview (Brattle Theater, May 4, 2010) discussing the Gilbert Ortiz photo of Wally Wood in his Derby, Connecticut studio. During his slideshows, Clowes did not make it clear that this small studio was just outside a two-story house where Wood lived at the time.

Gilbert describes the circumstances of this 1978 photo: "I was on my way to Boston, when I stopped off to visit Woody. It was a sunny day outside. In fact, the foto of Wally outside with the cup of java is right outside this studio. From what I remember, that was the only door. When we got inside, Wally sat down on his daybed to write something on his typewriter. Observing this, I stood back and took this shot. Woody was not big on idle chit chat. If he had something to say, a lot of times he would type it out and send off a letter or a short note. I remember receiving quite a few 'Words from Wood.'"

Slow Death 11 (1992)

Growing sand

2011-06-23T11:43:00.002-04:00

Errol Morris' Vernon, Florida (1982)

2011-06-23T08:41:00.003-04:00

John Garvin's documentary on early comic strips and the Landon School of Illustrating and Cartooning. Why doesn't the History Channel do a coverage of comic strips as good as this? For Garvin's PDF reprint of Landon's course, go here.

Cartoonists who took the Landon course:

Roger Armstrong
Carl Barks
Martin Branner
Gene Byrnes
George Clark
Sid Couchey
Milton Caniff
Jack Cole
Roy Crane
William Donahey
Edwina Dumm
Ric Estrada
Gil Fox
Paul Fung Sr
Floyd Gottfredson
Vince Hamlin
Ethel Hays
Bill Holman
Jud Hurd
Ed Kuekes
Stanley Link
Fred Locher
Bill Mauldin
Ken Muse
Fred Neher
Gladys Parker
Allen Saunders
Frederick Siebel
Dorman H. Smith
J.R. Williams
Chic Young

2011-06-21T23:27:00.004-04:00

Salvaged from the Realist Archive Project, here are my 1965 drawings of Dick Gregory, Woody Allen and Steve Allen. I'll forego my usual background notes on my work because I actually only have a vague memory of doing these. I do know that of all my contributions to The Realist, this was the only time Paul Krassner gave me an assignment to do portraits. Perhaps Bruce Stark was an influence here. As I recall, Stark did regular single column ink portraits during the 1960s for the Daily News in addition to his caricatures and sports cartoons. He was a staff artist at the Daily News for more than two decades.

Irwin Hasen's Green Lantern

2011-06-17T06:49:00.007-04:00

Irwin Hasen's cover for Green Lantern #29 (December 1947). Below is his painted recreation of that cover.

Irwin Hasen's autobiography, Loverboy (Vanguard, 2009) was written when he was 91. Below is "Wildcat", the character he created with Bill Finger for Sensation Comics #1 (January, 1942). In 1961 and 1962, he received the National Cartoonists Society's Newspaper Comic Strip Award for Dondi, which he created with Gus Edson in 1954.

I spoke with Irwin not long ago while trying to solve the Tex Blaisdell Mystery. Bob and Ray's Western character, Tex Blaisdell, was around in the early 1950s, but why did they give him the same name as the cartoonist Tex Blaisdell? The leading experts in vintage radio couldn't give me an answer and neither could Blaisdell's daughter, Barbara. It's an enigma wrapped in a comic strip.

Dondi (April 15, 1962)

For NY Graphic's interview with Irwin Hasen, go here. Below is Dondi on a plaque in Gus Edson Park (Stamford,Connecticut).

Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band

2011-06-11T12:12:00.005-04:00

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This is a collage I did in the summer of 1967 for Paul Williams' Crawdaddy. At the end of 1966, Paul moved Crawdaddy from Cambridge to New York. He was living on Jane Street, one block away from me, and he had his office on Sixth Avenue in the same building as the Folklore Center. As I recall, Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band was released in June, just as Paul finished paste-ups for his July-August issue (#10). So with no time or space to review the album, he asked me to do a "visual review" overnight.

It must have been rushed because only two songs are referenced, and the images have nothing to do with the Beatles. Instead, we see stills from Bewitched and Fellini's 8 1/2, plus the muted post horn from The Crying of Lot 49. I can't recall why I drew the flying locomotive or that free association; it's probably clipped from something else I had drawn. Maybe the asterisk devices are supposed to be diamonds from "Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds". The central block of copy was added by Paul or someone after I turned in the art.

To read Paul's 1966-68 issues of Crawdaddy, go here.

For two separate pages in Crawdaddy #11, in an effort to tune in to the spirit of the magazine, I did this lettering, obviously influenced by Rick Griffin.

2011-06-10T18:39:00.002-04:00

Milton Caniff drew this autobiographical comics page for the November 20, 1948 issue of Collier's.

Ella Cinders

2011-06-09T01:36:00.002-04:00

January 24, 1932

November 12, 1939

January 25, 1931

Harvey Kurtzman animation: Boat

2011-06-06T11:31:00.002-04:00

Harvey Kurtzman storyboarded this Sesame Street sequence for Phil Kimmelman and Associates. Boat was animated by Dante Barbetta, and Allen Swift supplied the voice. For more info, see John Benson's Squa Tront and Michael Sporn.

Wood Chips 34: High school poster

2011-06-03T08:59:00.003-04:00

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When Wood was in high school, he drew this surreal sophomore dance party poster. Notice his signature on the grass in the upper right. We featured this poster in the color section of the Against the Grain hardcover. Although the poster promises "fun" a half-dozen times, it actually conveys a quite different feeling, a fearful foreboding and a dark dance, perhaps similar to the Carrie prom night.

2011-05-29T22:04:00.001-04:00

Sometimes one can see the incorrect statement that Rebel Without a Cause was based on this novel. In truth, Irving Shulman turned in his 164-page Rebel Without a Cause script and walked off the film project. But he somehow then swung a deal with Warner Bros. to write this novel (with Judy and Buzz developed as much tougher and meaner characters). He did do the novelization of West Side Story in 1961.

As evident by the Children of the Dark title and Mitchell Hooks cover illustration, one could have walked past this in 1956 totally unaware that it had anything to do with the film. As I recall, the opening chapter describes a party that turns into a fight with frozen food.

For more Mitchell Hooks, go here.

2011-05-27T19:17:00.003-04:00

Milla Jovovich's "Gentleman Who Fell" is from her album, The Divine Comedy (1994). Milla said,"When I was first working on the sketch for the album cover, my mom introduced me to a young Russian artist named Alexey Steele. I looked at his sketch for the cover, and I saw that struggle, all the struggle that I'm singing about. It is the divine comedy." For more work by Alexey Steele, go here and click on "figurative paintings".

The 1993 "Gentleman Who Fell" video with Harry Dean Stanton was directed by Lisa Bonet. Milla wasn't happy with the result, so she made another video (1994), her homage to Maya Deren's Meshes of the Afternoon.

Gentleman Who Fell (1994), directed by Kae Garner

Maya Deren's Meshes of the Afternoon (1943)

Gentleman Who Fell (1993), directed by Lisa Bonet

2011-05-23T14:19:00.002-04:00

After many submissions, Roger Ebert recently won The New Yorker Cartoon Caption Contest. My own entries never even become finalists. Here's one of my favorites. If you don't get it, turn it 90˚ clockwise or bend head sideways.

2011-05-20T11:28:00.009-04:00

Popeye: The Great Comic Book Tales by Bud Sagendorf

Craig Yoe, editor and designer. Introduction by Jerry Beck. Yoe Books/IDW, $29.99 (176p) ISBN 978-1-60010-747-4

In the early 1930s, Bud Sagendorf’s sister worked in a Santa Monica art supply store where Popeye creator E.C. Segar bought his art materials. After she introduced the two, the 17-year-old Sagendorf soon had a job as Segar’s assistant on the Thimble Theatre comic strip.

For seven years, Sagendorf learned cartooning from the master. When Segar died in 1938, King Features inexplicably decided not to turn the strip over to Sagendorf. Instead, he was given a job laboring in the King Features bullpen.

In 1948, he began as the writer-artist of Dell’s Popeye comic books (a series he continued until 1962), and he took over the Thimble Theatre strip in 1959.

Craig Yoe notes that Sagendorf, in chalk talks and interviews, most often referred to his newspaper strip: “He rarely talked of his comic book work. Comic strips were Big Time. They had prestige and sometimes even financial reward. Comic books were low-rent, thought of as ‘only’ a kid’s medium, even greatly looked down on in some circles. But the comic books were a great artistic medium for Bud.”

Yoe offers nine color stories that were published between 1948 and 1957 with “a plethora of Popeye twister-sock punches, punchy art, and punch lines.” Yes, plenty of punches are thrown, including Popeye’s rotating “twisker-sock”. “Interplanetary Battle” (1952) pits Popeye against Jetoe, a shape-shifting Martian. “Shrink Weed” (1953), a wild adventure in which Popeye and Swee’pea are miniaturized and used for fish bait, was written a year after Mary Norton’s The Borrowers was first published, and it reads like a satire of Norton’s tiny family. In “The Happy Little Island” (1954) Popeye outwits the underground Dismal Demons who have caused happy islanders to become sad islanders. It’s evident that Sagendorf loved to create imaginative premises and see how Popeye, Wimpy, Olive Oyl and others would deal with the strange situations. It’s fun to go along on these fanciful flights, flowing easily from panel to panel.

The color restoration is effective except for a few conspicuous spots. Some other minor quibbles: An incorrect page number is given in a comparison of b/w original art with the printed color version. Captions in black type on a dark blue background are difficult to read even under a strong light.

As he has done with his other books, Yoe presents a fascinating selection of photos, memorabilia and relevant images, such as Sagendorf-inspired Popeye paintings by Roy Lichtenstein and Andy Warhol. There’s a 1938 Sagendorf cartoon from Popular Photography, an autographed flier from the 1977 installation of the Popeye statue in Segar’s birthplace, Chester, Illinois, and an “extremely rare” 16-page comic book Sagendorf drew for the Red Cross in 1946.

WWII Popeye postcards have spaces for servicemen to fill in their names and mail home. Outstanding is Sagendorf’s contribution to the 1956 Famous Artists Cartoon Course, pages showing basic drawing of objects and exteriors simplified in clean cartoon lines. Amid such delights are the humorous design devices one now expects from Yoe Studios: Page numbers throughout the book cleverly cascade from tiny cans of spinach (see page 43 above), and the front cover curves credits around a giant can of spinach.

Sagendorf’s life journey took him from Wenatchee, Washington, to Santa Monica to Manhattan to rural Connecticut to Florida. Bill Pearson, who wrote Popeye comic books after Sagendorf retired, recalled meeting him in Connecticut: “What a genius!... Sagendorf’s comic books were classics, completely his own, with a fascinating unique environment for the cast. He would fashion long, convoluted plots, with Popeye lost in strange places for pages, ruminating about his fate and the fate of the universe. Brilliant stream-of-consciousness tales, with plenty of action and suspense, and clever, silly cartooning that carried it all beautifully.”

Reading just a single story confirms that Pearson’s description is apt. Oddly, the National Cartoonists Society never gave Sagendorf any kind of award. They could make up for that shameful oversight by giving an award to Craig Yoe for delivering this attractive, eye-popping Popeye package.

Bud Sagendorf, at age 23, drawing the
Popular Photography cartoon seen above.

Clarence Nash on What's My Line? (December 12, 1954)

2011-05-15T10:22:00.002-04:00

Donald and Goofy: Clarence Nash and Pinto Colvig

Click to enlarge Doug Moench/Russ Heath

2011-05-13T17:06:00.002-04:00

In the early 1970s, Doug Moench worked the graveyard shift at the Chicago Sun-Times handling the teletype machines from one am to nine in the morning. As the clacketing machines churned out copy, filling the floor with teletype paper, Moench wrote his scripts for Creepy and Eerie, beginning with "Snow Job" in Creepy #29 (September 1970). Not long after dawn, he would distribute the teletype stories to the news desks and then go home to sleep.

When Moench saw Roger Ebert in the hall, he told him a piece he had written about the Warren magazines had speculative guesswork and was somewhat off the mark. Ebert said, "Who are you?" Moench said, "I write those stories!" Ebert then introduced Moench to Richard Takeuchi, the editor of the Sun-Times' Sunday magazine, Midwest, and suggested to Takeuchi that he have Moench write a piece about scripting for Creepy, Eerie and Vampirella.

Moench's article, "Confessions of a Ghost Writer", appeared in the June 25, 1972 issue of Midwest, accompanied by a full-color comics page, "The Mask Behind the Face", scripted by Moench and illustrated by Russ Heath, who felt he was being paid so well that he should deliver a full painting. It appears here in color for the first time since 1972. A b/w version was published in The Warren Companion (TwoMorrows, 2001). Before heading for New York to write for Marvel and DC, Moench contributed several other articles to Midwest in 1972-73. When one of those articles, a stream-of-consciousness reflection on violence in the Chicago subway system, was nominated for a Chicago Newspaper Guild Award, the entire Sun-Times staff, cued by syndicated columnist Bob Greene, broke into applause as Moench walked through the city room.

"Put out the lights and call the law!"

2011-05-11T12:47:00.000-04:00

The legendary Billy Daniels sings "That Old Black Magic", by Harold Arlen and Johnny Mercer, with Benny Payne on piano. Beginning in 1948, this became his signature song. His recording of "That Old Black Magic" sold 12,000,000 copies.

One seldom sees mention of Daniels' historic breakthrough: He was the first black performer to have his own sponsored network musical series, telecast on ABC in the fall of 1952.

Daniels became almost a forgotten figure over past decades, but since 2005, several CDs have brought back the magic.

2011-05-09T08:35:00.010-04:00

HBO's five-part miniseries of James M. Cain's Mildred Pierce, directed by Todd Haynes, is a magnificent recreation of the 1930s, with a look influenced by the photographs of Saul Leiter. It features a multilayered performance by Kate Winslet and a haunting score by Carter Burwell. NY locations became LA, including the California bungalow-style stucco homes in Merrick, Long Island. As explained in the "Making of" film, the Gables community in Merrick was created to make Hollywood actors feel at home on the East Coast.

Photo by Saul Leiter

2011-05-08T13:41:00.002-04:00

Like an artifact from a Philip K. Dick novel, the "Keep Calm and Carry On" poster was printed during World War II to be distributed during the German occupation of England. After WWII, the poster was shredded. It became a rarity, and only seven copies of the original poster are known to exist.

The revival began in 2001 after Barter Books (Alnwick Station, England) found the poster in the bottom of a box of books and began to sell facsimile copies. Sales escalated, and it eventually became the object of parody, such as "Keep Calm and Make Tea".

Now the poster's design and font has become influential. It's the apparent source for two film posters: The King's Speech and The Social Network. There's a shot in The King's Speech that briefly shows a "God Save the King" poster in the same style. Since Google Image doesn't bring up that poster, could that mean it was created for the film?

2011-05-06T15:13:00.010-04:00

Go Yoe @ Yoe Books

Barney Google: Gambling, Horse Races & High-Toned Women

Billy DeBeck, edited and designed by Craig Yoe, foreword by Richard Thompson. Yoe Books/IDW, $39.99 (248p) ISBN 978-1600106705

Craig Yoe does it again. His beautifully designed Barney Google presents nine months of Billy DeBeck’s daily strips from 1922, the memorable story sequence in which the racehorse Spark Plug was introduced. As one turns pages, Yoe’s brilliant skill as a designer, historian and visual editor becomes more and more evident, and it soon becomes apparent that he has planned this book like a race, taking the readers for a fast spin around the track. The front cover image, showing Barney atop Spark Plug, is from the cover of the rare Circulation magazine. With different coloring, this is the same drawing seen on the sheet music of the 1923 song hit “Barney Google (with the Goo-Goo-Googly Eyes)” by Billy Rose. The Spark Plug stories and the song catapulted DeBeck to fame.

“And they’re off!” The book opens to a huge full-color endpaper image of a reluctant Spark Plug on the day of a race, followed by pages showing the start of the race and a striking 1932 pencil original by DeBeck. The title page is curiously absent the book’s catchy subtitle (which means it will never appear in some listings and reviews). However, it displays another stunning color cartoon spread across two pages. The inventive syndicated strip cartoonist Richard Thompson (Cul de Sac, Richard’s Poor Almanac) contributes a hand-lettered foreword, “Barney Google and the Bigfoot Style” with cartoon illustrations “after DeBeck”.

“The race is on!” Following that extended display, the book finally gets underway at long last with Yoe’s essay, “Google This!”, tracking DeBeck’s rise to riches and analyzing the appeal of his character: “He became a squat runt, maybe because he suffered the blow delivered by the very world he schemed to beat. Barney started as a Mutt and ended as a Jeff… The new diminutive stature was certainly responsible for much of Barney’s appeal, a weird kind of appeal. Barney was rogue, sometimes a scoundrel, for sure a philanderer, and the ASPCA frowned upon horse kickers. But like lovable loser Homer Simpson or pilfering pirate Captain Jack Sparrow, we like and are rooting for Bad Boy Barney.”

“Spark Plug takes the lead!” DeBeck springs to life in Yoe’s profile of the cartoonist, contrasting night life fun with drawing board desperation: “In New York, DeBeck partied hard as he and his pals didn’t believe in Prohibition, and the cartoonist had trouble keeping up with deadlines. The story goes that his frustrated editor locked DeBeck up without his pants in a hotel room, so he couldn’t escape until he caught up with his work.”

“Hi Yoe, silver!” DeBeck died in 1942, and four years later, the National Cartoonists Society was organized. Yoe recounts how DeBeck’s widow, Mary (who remarried as Mary Bergman), stepped in and said she would provide the prize for an annual award if it were in the name of her late husband. The award was a silver cigarette case engraved with DeBeck’s characters. Thus, the Barney Award was launched, but the selection was by a committee of one. Milton Caniff recalled, “Mrs. DeBeck arbitrarily decided who would win. I’ve never talked with anyone who was consulted about it… She just made the choice and presented the award and that was that.” An interesting angle, but Yoe missed the punchline, the strange story of how the NCS pulled the ol' switcheroo to deny DeBeck lasting fame: On February 14, 1953, Mary Bergman was flying from Tampa to New Orleans in a National Airlines DC-6 when a thunderstorm sent the plane plummeting into the Gulf of Mexico, where it broke in half. Even as the last bodies, bubbles and debris surfaced from the ocean floor, the National Cartoonists Society had already submerged the Barney, replacing it with the Reuben (named for Rube Goldberg, the first NCS president). To freeze the NCS’ instantaneous revisionist history, the 1946-53 winners were all given Reuben statuettes and designated as Reuben winners rather than Barney winners.

“Heading for the homestretch!” After a rundown of films, animation, books and comic book reprints, Yoe offers “A Billy DeBeck Scrapbook”, a savory salmagundi of sheet music, advertisements, Cupples & Leon books and promotional images. Further insight into the cartoonist’s lifestyle is seen in the many photos of DeBeck drawing cartoons, playing golf and living it up with his celebrity pals. Racing into the homestretch, Spark Plug is shown galloping into glory in the final color endpaper spread.

“The winner’s circle!” Yoe has succeeded in recapturing the golden era when the leading syndicated cartoonists lived like kings. With comic strip champions Woody Gelman and Bill Blackbeard receding into the past, Yoe has picked up the torch, illuminating panels and pages. His fine flair for creative design has propelled him into the designer pantheon as the Milton Glaser of comics, and this book is such a scintillating, splendiferous delight that one closes it eager to dive headfirst into Yoe’s other IDW titles.

July 17, 1922

Death of Newspapers #19: The washable e-sheet

2011-05-05T10:37:00.001-04:00

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Only 15 years ago, people talked about how computers would not replace reading materials because you couldn't read a computer in the bathtub.

2011-04-28T15:56:00.001-04:00

Dan Steffan's Walrus Kong from AmaZed and CorfluZed (2009).

Ralph Reese self-portrait

2011-04-15T15:45:00.009-04:00

Successive enlargements reveal the incredible detail Ralph put into this drawing.

Ralph and Jay Lynch cleverly satirized Harvey Kurtzman in Bijou Funnies #8 (1972) with this underground comics variation of the Mad imitators page in Mad #17, which I posted on March 23. To see the Mad version, go here. I asked Jay about the creation of this page, and he responded, mentioning Art Spiegelman as a possible contributor:

Jay Lynch: I wrote it, I think. Art was staying at my pad for a while during the time I was putting the mag together, so he might have had some input. I think I did crude roughs. But it was Ralph who decided to make the character look like me, and it was Ralph who came up with the titles of the mags shown on the newsstand in the background. I wrote and did roughs for the Bodé parody in that ish; Pat Daley, a woman who did storyboards for ad agencies in Chicago did the final art on that one. Everything else in that ish was written by the cartoonists who drew their own strips.

Click on label for previous posts on Reese.

Origins of "hoohah"

2011-04-09T10:27:00.010-04:00

Page one of Mad #1

Watching HBO's Mildred Pierce, I was startled to see the owner of a Hollywood hashhouse say "hoo-ha". Mildred is looking for a job in 1931, and she's in Christof's restaurant when an argument develops between two waitresses over a tip. Christof intervenes and says, "Okay, okay, cut the hoo-ha!" (That's how it's spelled in the closed captions.)

James M. Cain liked to incorporate language he heard on the street, but "hoo-ha" is not in his novel Mildred Pierce (1941). So it was an addition to the screenplay by writer-director Todd Haynes. The Merriam Webster Dictionary gives the "first known use" as 1931 but has no citation for that source.

The word derives from the Yiddish hu-ha, meaning a commotion, uproar, hullabaloo, an argument between a group of people or an exclamation of surprise. I'd never given much thought to the word prior to Kurtzman's use in the first issue of Mad. He introduced several Yiddishisms in Mad, and he used "Hoohah" as a shout (as in "Melvin of the Apes"). But when it was first used on page one of Mad #1, it seemed to indicate the traditional meanings (and also Kurtzman's triumphant yell to announce the debut of Mad). Kurtzman had previously created a straight haunted house tale, "House of Horror", for the first 1950 issue of The Haunt of Fear, so he was actually satirizing himself with "Hoohah!"

Growing up in the South, all of the Yiddish expressions in Mad were unfamiliar to me until I read them in Mad in the early 1950s. I told Jay Lynch about the Mildred Pierce scene, and he responded with the New Jersey perspective:

I had heard "hoo-ha" used as a kid in my neighborhood in Newark before I saw it in Mad. In Mad it is used as an expletive. But I knew it to mean rigamarole or nonsense before that.

My Newark neighborhood (I lived at 721 Highland Ave.) was Jewish, Italian and black. Sometimes words intermixed. There are two specific words of my youth, which I haven't heard outside of that block in Newark. One is "Schneichick", which as a noun means a person who does a half-assed job at something, and as a verb means the same... i.e. "Don't be a schneichick! You're doing a scheneichick job vaccuming that rug!" The other word is pronounced "bootza" maybe spelled "butzah", and it means to flick something with your index finger.

The origin of Schneichick I know. It's a Yiddish thing... or a Russian thing... a kid in 19th-century Russia in a small village was named Schnei (a common name of the era, which means "Sainai"). Chic is a diminutive. So it means Schnei-boy. Anyway, Schnei's mother saw it was going to rain... so she told Schnei to close the windows... and he then closed the windows of every house in the village. The other Schneichick tale is that Schneichick's mother bought him a raincoat, which he then wore all the time... even when it wasn't raining.

"Butzah" might be an Italian word. There is no word in English with its precise meaning. But then again, it might be a Russian or Yiddish word. I don't know. I haven't heard anyone (outside of my relatives) use it since l947 in Newark on that block. Although my relatives continue to use that word. Hoo-ha which is, in their usage, synonomous with Bru-ha-ha.

I think words like "smek" and "furshlugginer" in Mad were humor at the time in that they were words used by old people. Yet in Mad they were used in a hip context, which made them unexpected and therefore humorous in that context. Kind of different from say Lenny Bruce's use of such Yiddish words, which were not words that had become arcane at the time he used them. Words like schmuck and schvartza which never left the lexicon. Actually, I never heard "furshlugginer" until I saw it in Mad. The word that means "crazy" would actually be "meshuganah". But where Kurtzman grew up maybe they had a different dialect on his block.

Kurtzman's ''Ikey and Mikey'' sidewalk comic I would think is based upon a risque song that was sung at the time by kids. Benny Bell did a cleaned-up, recorded version. I have kids singing a bit of the original version in the strip I did with Ed Piskor called "Dead Rat" which is on line somewhere. By the way, Benny Bell's grandson wrote a nifty biography of Benny Bell. I got a copy a few years back from Amazon. Bell did slightly risque comedy records in the 1940s and 1950s. He is famous for the old song "Shaving Cream" which Dr. Demento brought out of obscurity in the late 1970s. Most of Bell's stuff is based on anonymous neighborhood dirty songs. I still remember most of the original words to these. Most are on the order of "Sweet Violets". Not the Dinah Shore version, though.

You know, because I spoke Newarkese before I learned to read, I still don't know the correct pronounciation of a lot of words. I tend to use silent "r"s, and I still think that the Mayor of NYC was named LaGuadia.
   -- Jay Lynch

But now consider this passage from T.S. Eliot, which is curiously similar to the story elements in Kurtzman's "Hoohah!" Eliot's "hoo-ha's" are a mix of fear, guilt and terror.

When you're alone in the middle of the night
And you wake in a sweat and a hell of a fright
When you're alone in the middle of the bed
And you wake like someone hit you on the head
You've had a cream of a nightmare dream
And you've got the hoo-ha's coming to you
And you wait for a knock and the turning of a lock
   for you know the hangman's waiting for you.
And perhaps you're alive
And perhaps you're dead
Hoo ha ha
Hoo ha ha
Hoo
Hoo
Hoo
   −T. S. Eliot (Sweeney Agonistes, 1926)

For the full "Hoohah!", surf over to Jeff Overturf.

2011-04-02T11:29:00.006-04:00

Human Planet begins April 10 on the Discovery Channel.

Saturn fly-by: no CGI, no models, real color

2011-04-02T00:28:00.001-04:00

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Thousands of still photos stitched together by Greensboro, North Carolina, filmmaker Stephen Van Vuuren. For interview with Van Vuuren, go to Outside In.

2011-03-31T12:29:00.000-04:00

This is how The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction looked when it began in 1949 with the Bill Stone cover illustration and the evocative, flowing calligraphic logo by Mercury Publications' art director George Salter (1897-1967).

Co-editor Anthony Boucher (1911-1968) used as a pseudonym, H.H. Holmes, the name of a 19th-century serial killer. Oliver Onions (1873-1961) wrote the classic unforgettable psychological terror story, "The Beckoning Fair One", which can be read here.

Onions

Wood Chips 33: Mad Strikes Back!

2011-03-23T09:38:00.003-04:00

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In Mad #17 (November 1954), Harvey Kurtzman decided to fight back at the many imitators of Mad. In other words, a parody of parodies, cleverly incorporating the logos of the other comic books and employing Julius Caesar as the springboard. The Joseph Mankiewicz film with Marlon Brando had been released 15 months earlier. Brando must have liked the way he was depicted by Kurtzman and Wood, as he actually did sometimes refer to himself as "Marlon Branflakes".

None of these imitations had a handle on what Kurtzman had created, although Flip, Get Lost and Panic all had a certain appeal. Craig Yoe has a forthcoming book collecting Archie's Madhouse (not Madhouse, as I mistakenly had it here before). Madhouse and Eh! were two of the worst. Also forthcoming (in December) is John Benson's The Sincerest Form of Parody: The Best 1950s Mad Inspired Satirical Comics, with an introduction by Jay Lynch. This selection of 30 stories from the Mad imitators includes art by Jack Davis, Will Elder, Norman Maurer, Carl Hubbell, William Overgard, Jack Kirby, Dick Ayers, Bill Everett, Al Hartley, Ross Andru & Mike Esposito, Hy Fleischman, Jay Disbrow, Howard Nostrand and Bob Powell.

2011-03-17T11:29:00.009-04:00

When Russ Jones and I did Flashback magazine in 1972, we ran this art by Mort Drucker on the subscription ad page. It was later reprinted in Mort Drucker's Mad Show-Stoppers (1985). In retrospect, it should have been colored and used for a Flashback cover illustration.