Potrzebie
Monday, February 27, 2012
.
Paul Krassner and the publisher Lyle Stuart (1922-2006) had separate offices on the same floor at 225 Lafayette Street. This address was the location of EC Comics during the 1950s, and Stuart was a business advisor and close friend of EC and Mad publisher Bill Gaines.
In 1962, I went to deliver a Realist cartoon to Paul, and he said, "Lyle wants to see you." Since I had never met him, I asked, "Why?" Paul shrugged.
When I crossed the hall to Lyle Stuart's office, he told me he was moving and needed a cartoon mailing piece to let everyone know his company's new address. We talked about the books he was publishing, and he told me that his worst-selling book was Roger Price's J.G., the Upright Ape. I suggested a drawing with boxes and books scattered about. He said okay and gave me a catalog.
When I delivered the finished cartoon, he proposed doing a comic strip for his publication The Independent. I said, "Who is the writer?" He said. "I am." I guess he had something in mind with a political slant, but I never heard more about it. Perhaps he got caught up in more profitable pursuits. In retrospect, I feel I should have pressured him to give me a script. The girl in the upper left corner of the drawing is a caricature of his receptionist.
Paul Krassner and the publisher Lyle Stuart (1922-2006) had separate offices on the same floor at 225 Lafayette Street. This address was the location of EC Comics during the 1950s, and Stuart was a business advisor and close friend of EC and Mad publisher Bill Gaines.
In 1962, I went to deliver a Realist cartoon to Paul, and he said, "Lyle wants to see you." Since I had never met him, I asked, "Why?" Paul shrugged.
When I crossed the hall to Lyle Stuart's office, he told me he was moving and needed a cartoon mailing piece to let everyone know his company's new address. We talked about the books he was publishing, and he told me that his worst-selling book was Roger Price's J.G., the Upright Ape. I suggested a drawing with boxes and books scattered about. He said okay and gave me a catalog.
When I delivered the finished cartoon, he proposed doing a comic strip for his publication The Independent. I said, "Who is the writer?" He said. "I am." I guess he had something in mind with a political slant, but I never heard more about it. Perhaps he got caught up in more profitable pursuits. In retrospect, I feel I should have pressured him to give me a script. The girl in the upper left corner of the drawing is a caricature of his receptionist.
Lyle Stuart
Labels: krassner, lyle stuart, roger price
¶ 12:05 PM 0 comments
Sunday, February 20, 2011
This was a typographic twist I did for The Realist, experimenting with the flexible nature of rub-on presstype. It don't know which issue it was in, but it was reprinted in issue #89 (March-April 1971).
¶ 6:12 PM 0 comments
Wednesday, April 21, 2010
My first cartoon for Paul Krassner's The Realist was in issue #26 (May 1961), and I continued as a contributor over the next few years. In the fall of 1961, Ted White's wife, Sylvia, told me about how she had been amused by someone's routine about a comic strip, and she felt I should meet him. Not long after that, probably at Ted's office and mimeograph service on West 10th Street, I did encounter Ken Seagle, and after listening to him deliver a sort of rambling but entertaining monolog, I agreed to put it into pictures.
There were two problems, however. Ken would never put anything on paper, so I had to listen to him talk, prompt him, ask questions, take notes and do the script myself. That doesn't diminish his role as the true writer; it's my memory of the way we collaborated. It seemed he had never thought of it as a genuine comic strip; it was just a sort of premise he liked to rap about. I had hoped to get a stack of scripts so I could work well ahead, but that never happened. Since he was much more interested in the young woman who was living with me than sitting down to plan panels, he would soon become entranced by her and lose any focus on the scripts in progress.
Leaping these hurdles, I drew the first J.C. in 1961. The title was a specific reference to Johnny Hart's B.C. which began February 1958. (Curiously, around 1984-85, B.C. introduced religious themes, including some controversial strips yanked by newspaper editors.) In The Realist #30 (December 1961), J.C. began running as a series. In that same issue, Sylvia had two contributions, both satirizing folk music, under her maiden name byline, Sylvia Dees.
In Texas the following year, Frank Stack circulated among his friends a 14-page Xerox, The Adventures of Jesus (1962), which some call the first underground comic. For a unique slide show of Frank Stack talking about his paintings, Harvey Pekar and Robert Crumb, go here. Also see The Realist Archive Project.
The above J.C. installment appeared in issue #47 (February 1964). The character with the black beard is Judas. Click with cross-hair cursor for full enlargement.
Labels: b.c., frank stack, j.c., johnny hart, krassner, memoir, seagle, sylvia dees white, ted white, the adventures of jesus, the realist
¶ 1:54 PM 1 comments
Thursday, November 08, 2007
The Explainer
Click to enlarge.
The cartoon appeared on the front cover of the October 1965 issue of The Realist (#63) directly beneath A Little Play by Feiffer. This was very much in the previously established prankster nature of The Realist, but the juxaposition did not make Feiffer happy. Especially when he began to get phone calls from friends congratulating him on finally doing a self-satire.
Feiffer demanded a clarification, so Paul told him to write a letter, which appeared at the top of the letters column in the February 1966 issue (#64) under the heading, "The Explainer," an ironic reference to Feiffer's book The Explainers (1960). That title returns in two months on a new four-volume collection, Explainers: 10 Years of Jules Feiffer's Revolutionary Weekly Strip (Fantagraphics, 2008).
Feiffer's reaction reminded me of something Henry Morgan once said: "I can dish it out, but I can't take it." A few years later, Feiffer actually did do a cartoon about himself in an ad to promote one of his books.
©2007 Bhob Stewart and Paul Krassner
In 1965, Paul Krassner and I collaborated on a spoof of Jules Feiffer's weekly comic strip for The Realist, Paul's influential magazine of "freethought criticism and satire." I did a line drawing of Feiffer and made four copies to paste down amid copy written by Paul. My contribution to the writing was a reference to Feiffer's black panels similar to the Little Lulu pages of Tubby and Little Lulu talking in darkened rooms. Some were fooled by the parody. Writer-designer Michael Dooley (The Education of a Comics Artist) recalled seeing The Realist for the first time:
In many ways Paul, who started a magazine called The Realist in 1958, was a major influence on many people of my generation. It was subtitled "Freethought Criticism and Satire," and it was really a proto-underground newspaper, where you could find everyone from Norman Mailer and Kurt Vonnegut to Woody Allen and Dick Gregory to Ken Kesey and Tim Leary. I discovered it in 1965, when I was living in Brooklyn and had just begun studying design at Pratt Institute. The cover illustration looked like a Jules Feiffer cartoon, and since I was a big fan, I bought it. Turns out it was a parody written by Paul and drawn by EC fan-addict Bhob Stewart that poked fun at Feiffer. Ha! I’d been tricked, but delightedly so.
I was hooked, big time. I immediately mailed away for all available back issues and signed up for classes that Paul was teaching at the Free School in downtown Manhattan. His guest speakers included people like Michael O’Donoghue, who wrote the Phoebe Zeit-Geist comic for Evergreen Review, Abbie Hoffman, Emmett Grogan of the Diggers, just an incredible assortment of countercultural icons. Dick Guindon, an extremely talented but sadly undervalued cartoonist, was also involved in this class.
The signature does not say "Feiffer." It clearly reads "PK-bhob," but I tried to trick the eye and create an illusion that would resemble Feiffer's signature. I made an effort to extend such an illusion throughout by duplicating Feiffer's familiar layout, the use of a repetitive image and an attempt to mimic Feiffer's lettering style, complete with a double line on the emphasized words.
The cartoon appeared on the front cover of the October 1965 issue of The Realist (#63) directly beneath A Little Play by Feiffer. This was very much in the previously established prankster nature of The Realist, but the juxaposition did not make Feiffer happy. Especially when he began to get phone calls from friends congratulating him on finally doing a self-satire.
Feiffer demanded a clarification, so Paul told him to write a letter, which appeared at the top of the letters column in the February 1966 issue (#64) under the heading, "The Explainer," an ironic reference to Feiffer's book The Explainers (1960). That title returns in two months on a new four-volume collection, Explainers: 10 Years of Jules Feiffer's Revolutionary Weekly Strip (Fantagraphics, 2008).Feiffer's reaction reminded me of something Henry Morgan once said: "I can dish it out, but I can't take it." A few years later, Feiffer actually did do a cartoon about himself in an ad to promote one of his books.
Labels: bhob, feiffer, krassner, realist, the explainers
¶ 9:23 PM 3 comments
