Potrzebie
Friday, April 09, 2010
Topps #8: Bonnie and Clyde fumetti
I designed the Krigstein-influenced pages above as a section in The Bonnie and Clyde Scrapbook, published by Personality Posters in 1968. The story behind the creation of this book might be just as interesting as the book itself. (For full enlargement of the images, click and when you go to the next page, click again with the crosshairs cursor.)
Arthur Penn's Bonnie and Clyde was released in August 1967. I must have seen it that fall, and a few months later I read The True Story of Bonnie and Clyde as Told By Bonnie's Mother and Clyde's Sister (Signet, 1968), a reprint of Jan Fortune's Fugitives, The Story of Clyde Barrow and Bonnie Parker (1934). This book and the movie made me aware that Bonnie Parker had kept a scrapbook of newspaper clippings about the escapes of the Barrow gang from the law. It occurred to me that a facsimile of her scrapbook would make an interesting book, and I decided to present the idea to Woody Gelman, the publisher of Nostalgia Press.
In the spring of 1967, Art Spiegelman had introduced me to Woody Gelman at the historic Pete's Tavern, where O. Henry wrote "Gift of the Magi" in 1902. As a trial test, Gelman gave me an assignment to write and design an article on the Dionne Quintuplets for his planned Nostalgia Illustrated magazine. I found Gelman's clever concept, to do a magazine like a comic book, quite appealing and workable. (For instance, one article recreated a famous boxing match with a full page for each round.) After I wrote the Dionne article, I had to plow through a stack of Dionne paper dolls and other such memorabilia, calculating how to merge text and images into rows of panels.
Woody liked the finished result, so in the summer of 1967, I daily left Manhattan and rode the subway to the Bush Terminal in Brooklyn where Gelman was the art director of Topps Chewing Gum. I had office space at Topps, but I was working on Nostalgia Press projects. Almost immediately, he became nervous when he realized that Joel Shorin, the head of Topps, might be curious to know why non-Topps work was happening on the premises, so he would only meet with me during his lunch hour. By the end of the year, however, I was hired by Gelman to work full time in his department, drawing cartoon roughs and gags for Topps non-sports cards. (Click on the "topps" label at bottom to see the previous posts.)
By 1968, I was very familiar with Woody's publishing plans, and it seemed to me a book about the real Bonnie and Clyde could be a success for Nostalgia Press. I walked into Woody's office and outlined the book I wanted to create for him, The Bonnie and Clyde Scrapbook, a simulation of Bonnie Parker's actual scrapbook. I was quite surprised when he rejected the concept with very little discussion.
But the real surprise came a week later: He called me into his office and said, "Listen, my daughter Barbara has a great idea -- a book that will resemble Bonnie Parker's scrapbook. Here, I'm going to transfer her call to your phone."
If you think that sounds strange, imagine how I felt. I stood there, pole-axed. Had he simply forgotten our previous meeting? Perhaps I should have put the book's premise on paper instead of making a verbal presentation. Then I could have shown him a sheet of paper and waited for his reaction. To this day, I don't understand what happened there. But the nepotistic situation was a genuine trap. He was my boss, and I wanted to keep the job. So rather than fly into a rage, I said nothing and became a willing victim.
With the project underway, Woody mentioned a freelancer, Bill Hogarth, who he said was an expert at preparing presentations, and a week later, he showed me the dummy mock-up Hogarth had assembled. It showed a cover and a few opening pages. The rest of the presentation had blank pages.
Barbara Gelman took that presentation and went out to pitch the book. Despite the success of the movie, no one was interested. As I recall, she was rejected by nine publishers. However, at that time, Personality Posters was hot, and their posters were everywhere. From their main office at 74 Fifth Avenue, they also had a successful mail-order operation going with their only book, Who Was That? This was a picture book about familiar and unfamiliar character actors, and they sold it through full-page newspaper ads.
Because of the Bonnie and Clyde movie, posters of Warren Beatty and Faye Dunaway were Personality Posters' biggest sellers. But time was a factor. They agreed to publish The Bonnie and Clyde Scrapbook if it could be delivered in one week. They planned to market it the same way they sold Who Was That?
Barbara brought in the writer Ron Lackmann. This struck me as odd because there was nothing really to write except a few captions. I believe that kick-started Lackmann's career, since he went on to do more than 30 books in the past 40 years. (What I didn't know at the time was that it was more nepotism. Lackmann died two months ago and from obituaries I learned that he and Barbara had been living together for the past 50 years.)
A stack of 1930s news photos was acquired by Barbara from the stock photo service, Black Star. I decided the book needed Bonnie and Clyde movie stills. I went to the Warner Bros. offices at 666 Fifth Avenue and met with the head publicist who listened with interest as I explained what we were doing. He went away and came back carrying a huge binder with all the photo prints grommeted together. He told me to write down numbers of the stills I wanted, and I gave him a list with 70 numbers. When I went back to Warner Bros., they handed me a manila envelope filled with prints of all the stills I had requested.
To meet the seven-day deadline, a team of Topps people worked on the book after five o'clock and during lunch hours. This included polished production art by cartoonist Rick Varesi, whose usual job was creating rough comps for Topps packaging and products, and type mark-up by a nice guy named Paul, who worked in the Topps production department.
I began designing the page layouts, working my way through the pile of Black Star pictures. Since numbers on the stills from Warner Bros. were shuffled randomly, there was no way to put them in the proper narrative sequence, and I visualized a filmic fumetti. In Italian, the word "fumetti," literally "little puffs of smoke," refers to all comics, since speech balloons resembled smoke. After WWII, photo comics became wildly popular in Italy, and Fellini's The White Sheik (1952) is an amusing comedy film about a performer (Alberto Sordi) in the Italian photo comics industry. In English, the term "fumetti" was adopted as a label for photo comics in Harvey Kurtzman's Help! and elsewhere after the word was popularized in a 1959 Time article.
Working from my memory of the movie, I shuffled stills into what I hoped was the correct order. I had a notion to use photos in a vein similar to the Futurist painters and the comic book stories of Bernard Krigstein, in which composition, size and dimension relate to the underlying emotions and add to the impact of the narrative. I did six pages of layouts to create a pantomime photo story that would show the whole movie like a comic strip. I compressed all the stills into those six pages, trying different arrangements as I recalled both the film's editing and past pages drawn by Krigstein. Soon I saw the cascading images almost automatically juggled into the proper places with a jigsaw precision. For the final shoot-out page, I repeated some stills large/small/smaller and tried a Krigstein-like staccato effect in the design. The finale of the movie was an extended sequence of quick-cut editing, and I attempted to duplicate that on the printed page.
At the end of the week, we had succeeded in assembling the entire book. On the phone, Barbara told me to put my name in the byline, but I had such a negative reaction to her intrusion into my book proposal that I refused. The book looked slick and unusual, and we had met the deadline.
Personality Posters ran a large newspaper ad in The New York Times just as they had done with Who Was That? As soon as the ad appeared, Black Star sued Personality Posters, claiming that the ad violated the contractual agreement for one-time only use of the old news photos. I can't remember if Woody was included in this legal action, but I think he got out of it somehow. At any rate, that was it. There were no more ads, and there was no distribution of the book. One day I was walking on Broadway near 46th Street, and I went into the Personality Posters store. Next to the cash register were two tiny piles of the only books published by Personality Posters. They looked completely out of place in the poster store. I never saw The Bonnie and Clyde Scrapbook in any bookstore. What became of all the copies that were printed? I don't know.
During the months this was happening, a strange bit of synchronicity surfaced when I met Michael J. Pollard (Oscar-nominated for Bonnie and Clyde) shortly after he moved into the building directly across from where I lived on West 12th Street.
What became of Nostalgia Illustrated? It was never published. Instead, Woody sold it off to Magazine Management. They hired Alan Le Mond to edit a magazine which was titled Nostalgia Illustrated but was quite conventional in its approach. It had nothing to do with Woody's remarkable design concept of making a magazine look like a comic book. Even so, I became a contributor and for a while had an article appearing in each monthly issue.
A few years later, I suggested to Woody that if he did a display of his books at the Boston Book Fair, I would man the booth. This went as planned, and he and his wife came to Boston for the weekend. The Nostalgia Press books attracted a good deal of attention. However, I recall watching as two matronly types were very offended by the cover of The Bonnie and Clyde Scrapbook. They wandered off, muttering that they were going to complain to someone.
In 1975, I was in a bookstore paging through a book, The World of Art Deco (1973) by Bevis Hillier, a catalog of a touring exhibition with the same title. And that's how I learned that a copy of The Bonnie and Clyde Scrapbook had been included in that exhibition.
You've read the story of Jesse James
of how he lived and died.
If you're still in need;
of something to read,
here's the story of Bonnie and Clyde.
Now Bonnie and Clyde are the Barrow gang
I'm sure you all have read.
how they rob and steal;
and those who squeal,
are usually found dying or dead.
There's lots of untruths to these write-ups;
they're not as ruthless as that.
their nature is raw;
they hate all the law,
the stool pidgeons, spotters and rats.
They call them cold-blooded killers
they say they are heartless and mean.
But I say this with pride
that I once knew Clyde,
when he was honest and upright and clean.
But the law fooled around;
kept taking him down,
and locking him up in a cell.
Till he said to me;
"I'll never be free,
so I'll meet a few of them in hell"
The road was so dimly lighted
there were no highway signs to guide.
But they made up their minds;
if all roads were blind,
they wouldn't give up till they died.
The road gets dimmer and dimmer
sometimes you can hardly see.
But it's fight man to man
and do all you can,
for they know they can never be free.
From heart-break some people have suffered
from weariness some people have died.
But take it all in all;
our troubles are small,
till we get like Bonnie and Clyde.
If a policeman is killed in Dallas
and they have no clue or guide.
If they can't find a fiend,
they just wipe their slate clean
and hang it on Bonnie and Clyde.
There's two crimes committed in America
not accredited to the Barrow mob.
They had no hand;
in the kidnap demand,
nor the Kansas City Depot job.
A newsboy once said to his buddy;
"I wish old Clyde would get jumped.
In these awful hard times;
we'd make a few dimes,
if five or six cops would get bumped"
The police haven't got the report yet
but Clyde called me up today.
He said,"Don't start any fights;
we aren't working nights,
we're joining the NRA."
From Irving to West Dallas viaduct
is known as the Great Divide.
Where the women are kin;
and the men are men,
and they won't "stool" on Bonnie and Clyde.
If they try to act like citizens
and rent them a nice little flat.
About the third night;
they're invited to fight,
by a sub-gun's rat-tat-tat.
They don't think they're too smart or desperate
they know that the law always wins.
They've been shot at before;
but they do not ignore,
that death is the wages of sin.
Some day they'll go down together
they'll bury them side by side.
To few it'll be grief,
to the law a relief
but it's death for Bonnie and Clyde.
--Bonnie Parker
First stanza of "The Story of Bonnie and Clyde" by Bonnie Parker
(in Clyde Barrow's handwriting)
(in Clyde Barrow's handwriting)
I designed the Krigstein-influenced pages above as a section in The Bonnie and Clyde Scrapbook, published by Personality Posters in 1968. The story behind the creation of this book might be just as interesting as the book itself. (For full enlargement of the images, click and when you go to the next page, click again with the crosshairs cursor.)
Arthur Penn's Bonnie and Clyde was released in August 1967. I must have seen it that fall, and a few months later I read The True Story of Bonnie and Clyde as Told By Bonnie's Mother and Clyde's Sister (Signet, 1968), a reprint of Jan Fortune's Fugitives, The Story of Clyde Barrow and Bonnie Parker (1934). This book and the movie made me aware that Bonnie Parker had kept a scrapbook of newspaper clippings about the escapes of the Barrow gang from the law. It occurred to me that a facsimile of her scrapbook would make an interesting book, and I decided to present the idea to Woody Gelman, the publisher of Nostalgia Press.
In the spring of 1967, Art Spiegelman had introduced me to Woody Gelman at the historic Pete's Tavern, where O. Henry wrote "Gift of the Magi" in 1902. As a trial test, Gelman gave me an assignment to write and design an article on the Dionne Quintuplets for his planned Nostalgia Illustrated magazine. I found Gelman's clever concept, to do a magazine like a comic book, quite appealing and workable. (For instance, one article recreated a famous boxing match with a full page for each round.) After I wrote the Dionne article, I had to plow through a stack of Dionne paper dolls and other such memorabilia, calculating how to merge text and images into rows of panels.
Woody liked the finished result, so in the summer of 1967, I daily left Manhattan and rode the subway to the Bush Terminal in Brooklyn where Gelman was the art director of Topps Chewing Gum. I had office space at Topps, but I was working on Nostalgia Press projects. Almost immediately, he became nervous when he realized that Joel Shorin, the head of Topps, might be curious to know why non-Topps work was happening on the premises, so he would only meet with me during his lunch hour. By the end of the year, however, I was hired by Gelman to work full time in his department, drawing cartoon roughs and gags for Topps non-sports cards. (Click on the "topps" label at bottom to see the previous posts.)
By 1968, I was very familiar with Woody's publishing plans, and it seemed to me a book about the real Bonnie and Clyde could be a success for Nostalgia Press. I walked into Woody's office and outlined the book I wanted to create for him, The Bonnie and Clyde Scrapbook, a simulation of Bonnie Parker's actual scrapbook. I was quite surprised when he rejected the concept with very little discussion.
But the real surprise came a week later: He called me into his office and said, "Listen, my daughter Barbara has a great idea -- a book that will resemble Bonnie Parker's scrapbook. Here, I'm going to transfer her call to your phone."
If you think that sounds strange, imagine how I felt. I stood there, pole-axed. Had he simply forgotten our previous meeting? Perhaps I should have put the book's premise on paper instead of making a verbal presentation. Then I could have shown him a sheet of paper and waited for his reaction. To this day, I don't understand what happened there. But the nepotistic situation was a genuine trap. He was my boss, and I wanted to keep the job. So rather than fly into a rage, I said nothing and became a willing victim.
With the project underway, Woody mentioned a freelancer, Bill Hogarth, who he said was an expert at preparing presentations, and a week later, he showed me the dummy mock-up Hogarth had assembled. It showed a cover and a few opening pages. The rest of the presentation had blank pages.
Barbara Gelman took that presentation and went out to pitch the book. Despite the success of the movie, no one was interested. As I recall, she was rejected by nine publishers. However, at that time, Personality Posters was hot, and their posters were everywhere. From their main office at 74 Fifth Avenue, they also had a successful mail-order operation going with their only book, Who Was That? This was a picture book about familiar and unfamiliar character actors, and they sold it through full-page newspaper ads.
Because of the Bonnie and Clyde movie, posters of Warren Beatty and Faye Dunaway were Personality Posters' biggest sellers. But time was a factor. They agreed to publish The Bonnie and Clyde Scrapbook if it could be delivered in one week. They planned to market it the same way they sold Who Was That?
Barbara brought in the writer Ron Lackmann. This struck me as odd because there was nothing really to write except a few captions. I believe that kick-started Lackmann's career, since he went on to do more than 30 books in the past 40 years. (What I didn't know at the time was that it was more nepotism. Lackmann died two months ago and from obituaries I learned that he and Barbara had been living together for the past 50 years.)
A stack of 1930s news photos was acquired by Barbara from the stock photo service, Black Star. I decided the book needed Bonnie and Clyde movie stills. I went to the Warner Bros. offices at 666 Fifth Avenue and met with the head publicist who listened with interest as I explained what we were doing. He went away and came back carrying a huge binder with all the photo prints grommeted together. He told me to write down numbers of the stills I wanted, and I gave him a list with 70 numbers. When I went back to Warner Bros., they handed me a manila envelope filled with prints of all the stills I had requested.
To meet the seven-day deadline, a team of Topps people worked on the book after five o'clock and during lunch hours. This included polished production art by cartoonist Rick Varesi, whose usual job was creating rough comps for Topps packaging and products, and type mark-up by a nice guy named Paul, who worked in the Topps production department.
I began designing the page layouts, working my way through the pile of Black Star pictures. Since numbers on the stills from Warner Bros. were shuffled randomly, there was no way to put them in the proper narrative sequence, and I visualized a filmic fumetti. In Italian, the word "fumetti," literally "little puffs of smoke," refers to all comics, since speech balloons resembled smoke. After WWII, photo comics became wildly popular in Italy, and Fellini's The White Sheik (1952) is an amusing comedy film about a performer (Alberto Sordi) in the Italian photo comics industry. In English, the term "fumetti" was adopted as a label for photo comics in Harvey Kurtzman's Help! and elsewhere after the word was popularized in a 1959 Time article.
Working from my memory of the movie, I shuffled stills into what I hoped was the correct order. I had a notion to use photos in a vein similar to the Futurist painters and the comic book stories of Bernard Krigstein, in which composition, size and dimension relate to the underlying emotions and add to the impact of the narrative. I did six pages of layouts to create a pantomime photo story that would show the whole movie like a comic strip. I compressed all the stills into those six pages, trying different arrangements as I recalled both the film's editing and past pages drawn by Krigstein. Soon I saw the cascading images almost automatically juggled into the proper places with a jigsaw precision. For the final shoot-out page, I repeated some stills large/small/smaller and tried a Krigstein-like staccato effect in the design. The finale of the movie was an extended sequence of quick-cut editing, and I attempted to duplicate that on the printed page.
At the end of the week, we had succeeded in assembling the entire book. On the phone, Barbara told me to put my name in the byline, but I had such a negative reaction to her intrusion into my book proposal that I refused. The book looked slick and unusual, and we had met the deadline.
During the months this was happening, a strange bit of synchronicity surfaced when I met Michael J. Pollard (Oscar-nominated for Bonnie and Clyde) shortly after he moved into the building directly across from where I lived on West 12th Street.
What became of Nostalgia Illustrated? It was never published. Instead, Woody sold it off to Magazine Management. They hired Alan Le Mond to edit a magazine which was titled Nostalgia Illustrated but was quite conventional in its approach. It had nothing to do with Woody's remarkable design concept of making a magazine look like a comic book. Even so, I became a contributor and for a while had an article appearing in each monthly issue.
A few years later, I suggested to Woody that if he did a display of his books at the Boston Book Fair, I would man the booth. This went as planned, and he and his wife came to Boston for the weekend. The Nostalgia Press books attracted a good deal of attention. However, I recall watching as two matronly types were very offended by the cover of The Bonnie and Clyde Scrapbook. They wandered off, muttering that they were going to complain to someone.
In 1975, I was in a bookstore paging through a book, The World of Art Deco (1973) by Bevis Hillier, a catalog of a touring exhibition with the same title. And that's how I learned that a copy of The Bonnie and Clyde Scrapbook had been included in that exhibition.
Final resting place of the beleaguered Bonnie and Clyde Scrapbook
You've read the story of Jesse James
of how he lived and died.
If you're still in need;
of something to read,
here's the story of Bonnie and Clyde.
Now Bonnie and Clyde are the Barrow gang
I'm sure you all have read.
how they rob and steal;
and those who squeal,
are usually found dying or dead.
There's lots of untruths to these write-ups;
they're not as ruthless as that.
their nature is raw;
they hate all the law,
the stool pidgeons, spotters and rats.
They call them cold-blooded killers
they say they are heartless and mean.
But I say this with pride
that I once knew Clyde,
when he was honest and upright and clean.
But the law fooled around;
kept taking him down,
and locking him up in a cell.
Till he said to me;
"I'll never be free,
so I'll meet a few of them in hell"
The road was so dimly lighted
there were no highway signs to guide.
But they made up their minds;
if all roads were blind,
they wouldn't give up till they died.
The road gets dimmer and dimmer
sometimes you can hardly see.
But it's fight man to man
and do all you can,
for they know they can never be free.
From heart-break some people have suffered
from weariness some people have died.
But take it all in all;
our troubles are small,
till we get like Bonnie and Clyde.
If a policeman is killed in Dallas
and they have no clue or guide.
If they can't find a fiend,
they just wipe their slate clean
and hang it on Bonnie and Clyde.
There's two crimes committed in America
not accredited to the Barrow mob.
They had no hand;
in the kidnap demand,
nor the Kansas City Depot job.
A newsboy once said to his buddy;
"I wish old Clyde would get jumped.
In these awful hard times;
we'd make a few dimes,
if five or six cops would get bumped"
The police haven't got the report yet
but Clyde called me up today.
He said,"Don't start any fights;
we aren't working nights,
we're joining the NRA."
From Irving to West Dallas viaduct
is known as the Great Divide.
Where the women are kin;
and the men are men,
and they won't "stool" on Bonnie and Clyde.
If they try to act like citizens
and rent them a nice little flat.
About the third night;
they're invited to fight,
by a sub-gun's rat-tat-tat.
They don't think they're too smart or desperate
they know that the law always wins.
They've been shot at before;
but they do not ignore,
that death is the wages of sin.
Some day they'll go down together
they'll bury them side by side.
To few it'll be grief,
to the law a relief
but it's death for Bonnie and Clyde.
--Bonnie Parker
Labels: beatty, bonnie and clyde, dunaway, fumetti, gelman, memoir, penn, pollard, topps, warner bros.
¶ 3:53 PM 4 comments
Sunday, November 11, 2007
Franklin Booth
.
Growing up on a remote farm in Carmel, Indiana, Booth developed his unique pen-and-ink style as the result of a misunderstanding. Living in a rural area and having no knowledge of printing technology, Booth used pen and ink to copy the images he saw in 19th-century magazines, yet he was unaware that he was looking at wood engravings. He thought he was duplicating the look of the originals, as noted by Jim Vadeboncoeur:
Booth's New York studio was on 57th Street from 1910 until his death in 1948, but for many years he returned to his hometown each summer. In 1914, Theodore Dreiser and Booth made an automotive road trip from New York to Indiana, which they documented in A Hoosier Holiday (1916), written by Dreiser with illustrations by Booth. When Booth proposed the trip, Dreiser said, "All my life I've been thinking of making a return trip to Indiana and writing a book about it". With full chapters on the idyllic way of life in Carmel, this book is regarded today as a forerunner to the American road novel and a possible influence on Jack Kerouac's On the Road.
In addition to Scribner's and Harper's, Booth's art was published in Century, Cosmopolitan, Everybody's, Good Housekeeping, House & Garden, Ladies Home Journal, McClure's, Redbook and more. His work was collected in Franklin Booth: 60 Drawings (1925), reprinted in 1978 by Woody Gelman's Nostalgia Press as The Art of Franklin Booth. The illustration at top was used on the cover of John Fleskes' Franklin Booth: Painter with a Pen (2002), the first title from Fleskes' Flesk Publications five years ago. The book features an introduction by Roy Krenkel (1918-1983), who was greatly influenced by Booth and Norman Lindsay (1879-1969). The paperback edition was issued by Flesk this past summer. Manuel Auad included a 16-page color section in his Franklin Booth: American Illustrator (Auad Publishing, 2006).
I previously posted in August a rare Franklin Booth (1874-1948) drawing which I scanned from the book Mimeograph Illustration Inset Portfolio: Drawings by Foremost Artists on Stencils Ready For Printing, published by the A.B. Dick Company (Chicago) in 1940. I say "rare" because how many copies of that catalog were ever saved by the schools and churches that used it? The newsprint paper quality prevented a full appreciation of Booth's line work, so here's another by Booth, a magnificent fantasy scene. When you enlarge, notice how the tiny figures in the distance provide a sense of scale amid the towering trees.
Growing up on a remote farm in Carmel, Indiana, Booth developed his unique pen-and-ink style as the result of a misunderstanding. Living in a rural area and having no knowledge of printing technology, Booth used pen and ink to copy the images he saw in 19th-century magazines, yet he was unaware that he was looking at wood engravings. He thought he was duplicating the look of the originals, as noted by Jim Vadeboncoeur:
Isolated on an Indiana farm and determined to be an artist, he studied what he saw on the pages of Scribner's, Harpers and the other illustrated magazines of the day. What he saw, and what there was to see, were wood-engraved images. Photographic reproduction was in its infancy and was used primarily for halftones of paintings. After all, everyone knew how to reproduce pen & ink work: you engraved it on wood. Booth, not knowing that the line and even the "feel" of the image was a product of the engraver, copied what he saw using pen on paper. By the turn of the century, when Booth was embarking on his incredible career, the technology had advanced enough so that his pen work could be reproduced as he crafted it. His style was an amazing amalgam of antique appeal and awesome artistry. Soaring, majestic scenes were crafted with thousands of lines, each placed in the precise position with respect to its neighbor to provide just the right density and shade...
The "old-time" feeling that hearkens back to the wood-engraved images of the 19th century really doesn't explain why modern art students are so taken with the approach. I think that what attracted interest then and now is the talent and compositional skills that were conspicuously absent in his contemporary mimics. These compositional abilities are even more amazing when one learns that Booth crafted his images a section at a time, painstakingly detailing a portion in ink that he had carefully penciled. He would complete a section in ink before applying the pencil to another part of the drawing. The innumerable strokes of the pen were prone to cause smudging if he were to have fully penciled the entire piece, so this piecemeal approach was his norm. To create and maintain a consistent and regular pattern and density of lines using this method must have been exceedingly difficult, yet he seems to have carried it off with aplomb.
Booth's New York studio was on 57th Street from 1910 until his death in 1948, but for many years he returned to his hometown each summer. In 1914, Theodore Dreiser and Booth made an automotive road trip from New York to Indiana, which they documented in A Hoosier Holiday (1916), written by Dreiser with illustrations by Booth. When Booth proposed the trip, Dreiser said, "All my life I've been thinking of making a return trip to Indiana and writing a book about it". With full chapters on the idyllic way of life in Carmel, this book is regarded today as a forerunner to the American road novel and a possible influence on Jack Kerouac's On the Road. The Carmel paean by Dreiser and Booth put the town on the map, so to speak, and their book has been reprinted several times, most recently in 1997 by the Indiana University Press and last July by Kessinger Publishing. Yet curiously, not even a single sentence about Carmel's famous native can be found in the town's official online histories. Although Carmel has invested more than $10 million in the development of the Carmel Arts & Design District and the recreation of "historic" Old Town Carmel where "fresh new facades... create a Main Street of old," one can search in vain for any online mention there of Booth. Instead, the favorite son is Leslie Haines, an electrical engineer who designed and installed an early traffic light in 1923 when the population of Carmel was still only a few hundred people.
In addition to Scribner's and Harper's, Booth's art was published in Century, Cosmopolitan, Everybody's, Good Housekeeping, House & Garden, Ladies Home Journal, McClure's, Redbook and more. His work was collected in Franklin Booth: 60 Drawings (1925), reprinted in 1978 by Woody Gelman's Nostalgia Press as The Art of Franklin Booth. The illustration at top was used on the cover of John Fleskes' Franklin Booth: Painter with a Pen (2002), the first title from Fleskes' Flesk Publications five years ago. The book features an introduction by Roy Krenkel (1918-1983), who was greatly influenced by Booth and Norman Lindsay (1879-1969). The paperback edition was issued by Flesk this past summer. Manuel Auad included a 16-page color section in his Franklin Booth: American Illustrator (Auad Publishing, 2006).
Labels: booth, drawing, krenkel, mimeograph
¶ 8:02 AM 4 comments
Sunday, January 30, 2011
First appearance of Popeye in 1929.
Above is Rick Baker's Popeye from Fire Wire's What If Cartoon Characters Were
Real? Sort of reminds of Jack Kerouac speculating about what if the Three Stooges were real in Vanity of Dulouz. Also see The Wisdom of Popeye. In his recent autobiography, Jules Feiffer explains how he wrote his Popeye screenplay based on the 1936 E.C. Segar strips in Woody Gelman's 1971 Nostalgia Press Popeye the Sailor book.
Below is from Jeff Koons' Popeye Series. For more on Koons' Popeye Series, go here.
Here is Frederic Tuten's story about Popeye, "L'Odysee", first published in Jeff Koons: Popeye Series (London: Serpentine Gallery and Koenig Books, 2009). Tuten previously did a novelization of Tintin in Tintin in the New World (2005).
To read the rest of the story, go to Literarian.
"L'Odysee" by Frederic Tuten
Then I made me way into the tottering house itself and found it all in shambles. A clothesline freighted with frilly red underwear, not mine, and three pairs of long johns, not mine, stretched across the living room. The bathroom reeked of men’s after-shave and colognes – Brute – and was littered with gum stimulators, nose-hair scissors, moustache trimmers, nail cutters and other implements and toiletries that I never use.
The bedroom. The bedroom. It stabbed me heart. Men’s boots and shoes of various sizes and shapes, quality and age were lined along the wall. But not one pair of mine in the lot.
“What! That you?” She said, pulling down the edge of her slinky black negligee.
I was charged with great emotion, seeing her spread out there in our old bed, seeing her unchanged not a jot in all the years I had been gone. Not one wrinkle, not one gray hair, not one bump or wart or blemish. She was her old skinny self with a few new appealing curves, her tongue still as sharp as her pointy elbows.
Before I could answer her, Nestor with all the juice of his youth dried out of him, limped into the room – where was his forth leg? – and gave me a steady look and a short sniff. Sniff sniff, like a sneeze that had fallen asleep; then he turned about and limped out the door as if I were not there, had never lived there, would never again live there.
“Nestor,” I cried, “It’s me.”
Not a glance me way. He may be deaf, I thought, seeing him slouch off like an old man with a missing leg, en plus. Age and loss. Twin themes I had thought would never visit me.
“Yes, it’s me come home,” I said, as she rose from the bed and wrapped about her a great green house coat which covered her from foot to neck – her head sticking out like a white bean squeezed from its pod.
“Returned home like the faithful sailor you are. Away for a thousand years and never a post card.”
“It’s a long and odd story, my dear, and one I’m eager to tell.”
“The world may be all ears but I’m not,” she said. “Your berth’s been taken, sailor, so cast off.”
She was her same wonderful biting self but with a decidedly new and attractive twist. Her once long and sharp toe nails were now trim and shaded rose. Her feet, peeking out from under the train of her robe, usually rough and dry like barnacles, were presently smooth and, dare I say, creamy. Dare I say, fetching!
Continued at Literarian. All of the above are close but no Segar. Here's the real deal:
Segar satirized cartoonists as seen in this reprint from Nemo #3 (October 1983). To read Bill Blackbeard on Segar in that issue, go Inside Jeff Overturf's Head.
After Segar died of liver disease in 1938 at age 43, his strip was continued by Tom Sims, Doc Winner, Bill Zaboly, Bud Sagendorf, Hy Eisman and Bobby London, who did the strip from 1986 until he was fired from King Features in 1992. London said, "Segar was, as far as my career, as far as making a decision to be a professional cartoonist, Segar was the seminal influence in my career."
Here's the controversial Bobby London finale with misunderstandings that ensued after Olive Oyl received a toy doll from the Home Shopping Network.
Continued at Literarian. All of the above are close but no Segar. Here's the real deal:
Popeye lifts Elzie Segar.
Segar satirized cartoonists as seen in this reprint from Nemo #3 (October 1983). To read Bill Blackbeard on Segar in that issue, go Inside Jeff Overturf's Head.
After Segar died of liver disease in 1938 at age 43, his strip was continued by Tom Sims, Doc Winner, Bill Zaboly, Bud Sagendorf, Hy Eisman and Bobby London, who did the strip from 1986 until he was fired from King Features in 1992. London said, "Segar was, as far as my career, as far as making a decision to be a professional cartoonist, Segar was the seminal influence in my career."
Here's the controversial Bobby London finale with misunderstandings that ensued after Olive Oyl received a toy doll from the Home Shopping Network.
Popeye waves goodbye.
Labels: bill blackbeard, bobby london, gelman, koons, marschall, nemo, overturf, popeye, sagendorf, segar, sims, tuten, zaboly
¶ 11:22 AM 0 comments
Thursday, December 23, 2010
Wood Chips 24: Sunset on Mars
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Click "Wood Chips 24" heading at top to hear Ray Bradbury's "Mars Is Heaven" on X Minus One (1955). EC's adaptation was in Weird Science 18 (March-April, 1953). Following the Wood panels while listening offers a textbook example of specific differences in adapting a short story for radio and comics. Wood's research into period architecture is seen throughout amid lush vegetation, and he also drew what he knew; between 1937 and 1940, he lived in four different small towns in Wisconsin.
Drawing Green Lake, Wisconsin (a real place), he filled the interiors with such Victoriana as a roll-top desk and a shelf for displaying dishes. Surely Bradbury must have been delighted the first time he saw Wood's interpretation of his story. But note the curious window on page five which has four panes on the bottom sash and six on the top sash (which fills two-thirds of the window frame). This is similar to Wood's "There Will Come Soft Rains" error of the automobile preventing the automatic garage door from opening and closing.
H.B Vestal was the first illustrator of "Mars Is Heaven" in Planet Stories (Fall 1948).
1890s Queen Anne style Victorian homes in Wisconsin. (Top two images are the same building from different angles.)
To read the entire Wally Wood "Spawn of Mars" story, go to Cloud 109. It was published in EC's Weird Fantasy 9 (September-October, 1951).
To read the entire 3D "Spawn of Venus" story. go to Golden Age Comic Book Stories. It was created for an unpublished EC 3-D title (1954), but it was never published by EC.
In 1968, to get the original art for the Nostalgia Press EC reprint book, I went with Bill Gaines and Jerry DeFuccio to the real vault of horror, a midtown storage facility where Gaines kept the art for each of his comic books in large individual manila envelopes. I remember this as a large, dimly lit room with a concrete floor and locked storage rooms somewhat like small trailers. These had to be pulled out and unlocked. It was necessary to set up a work light on a stand inside the storage trailer so Jerry DeFuccio could locate each envelope. Gaines pulled a story from each envelope and handed the envelope back to Jerry. Then I stacked each story on a nearby table.
Earlier, when I told Wood I was going to Gaines' vault, he asked me to retrieve his 3-D sf story, "The Spawn of Venus", so he could use it in witzend. That was the first time Wood had seen the artwork in 15 years, and he then published it in witzend 6 (1969).
To see all of the "Spawn of Venus" pencil pages, go to stwallskull.
To read the entire Al Feldstein "Spawn of Venus", go to Entre Comics. It was originally in Weird Science 6 (March-April, 1951).
Drawing Green Lake, Wisconsin (a real place), he filled the interiors with such Victoriana as a roll-top desk and a shelf for displaying dishes. Surely Bradbury must have been delighted the first time he saw Wood's interpretation of his story. But note the curious window on page five which has four panes on the bottom sash and six on the top sash (which fills two-thirds of the window frame). This is similar to Wood's "There Will Come Soft Rains" error of the automobile preventing the automatic garage door from opening and closing.
©copyright 2010 by WMG estate and Ray Bradbury
H.B Vestal was the first illustrator of "Mars Is Heaven" in Planet Stories (Fall 1948).
To read the entire Wally Wood "Spawn of Mars" story, go to Cloud 109. It was published in EC's Weird Fantasy 9 (September-October, 1951).
In 1968, to get the original art for the Nostalgia Press EC reprint book, I went with Bill Gaines and Jerry DeFuccio to the real vault of horror, a midtown storage facility where Gaines kept the art for each of his comic books in large individual manila envelopes. I remember this as a large, dimly lit room with a concrete floor and locked storage rooms somewhat like small trailers. These had to be pulled out and unlocked. It was necessary to set up a work light on a stand inside the storage trailer so Jerry DeFuccio could locate each envelope. Gaines pulled a story from each envelope and handed the envelope back to Jerry. Then I stacked each story on a nearby table.
Earlier, when I told Wood I was going to Gaines' vault, he asked me to retrieve his 3-D sf story, "The Spawn of Venus", so he could use it in witzend. That was the first time Wood had seen the artwork in 15 years, and he then published it in witzend 6 (1969).
©copyright 2010 by WMG estate and Bill Pearson
To see all of the "Spawn of Venus" pencil pages, go to stwallskull.
To read the entire Al Feldstein "Spawn of Venus", go to Entre Comics. It was originally in Weird Science 6 (March-April, 1951).
Above images ©copyright 2010 by WMG estate.
Labels: bradbury, defuccio, feldstein, gaines, mars, pearson, stwallskull, witzend, wood chips
¶ 3:05 PM 2 comments
Friday, March 06, 2009
Topps #1: Dick Tracy wallpaper
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Dick Tracy wallpaper? Yes, this was marketed in 1950 by the Niagara Wallpaper Company. It was intended for a children's room, which explains why none of the strip's famed villains are evident.
During the time I was doing product development at Topps Chewing Gum in the late 1960s, I was also working on the Nostalgia Press book collection of EC Comics, prompting visits to the Mad offices for several meetings with publisher Bill Gaines. The more conspicuous item among the oddities in his office was a fake window. It contained a life-size head of King Kong (sculpted by Sergio Aragones) looking through the window frame at Gaines.
Back at Topps in Brooklyn, I thought about the Kong window and wondered how something similar could be done as a Topps product. For its humorous posters, Topps used a newsprint paper stock that folded several times down to their standard small trading card package size. The visual concept I pitched was King Kong Wallpaper, a product which would use such newsprint posters to make giant-size b/w jigsaw puzzle pieces that could be collected and assembled to fill one entire wall of a kid's room. A single image of Kong could then loom in an immense fashion to give nightmares. Kids would love it; it would be the mothers who had the nightmares of Elmer's Glue all over the wall.
At Topps, puzzle pieces were considered the "B" side on a trading card, on the theory that no one wants to purchase individual jigsaw puzzle pieces. So my idea was shot down with the somewhat illogical question, "What's on the other side?" In retrospect, the solution would have been to simply package the folded newsprint puzzle posters with some colorful trading card item.
Maybe something similar happened at the Niagara Wallpaper Company. Someone thought how cool it would be to see a roomful of weird and outrageous Dick Tracy villains. Then some executive stepped in to get rid of the villains, making the final wallpaper bland and banal.
.Dick Tracy wallpaper? Yes, this was marketed in 1950 by the Niagara Wallpaper Company. It was intended for a children's room, which explains why none of the strip's famed villains are evident.
During the time I was doing product development at Topps Chewing Gum in the late 1960s, I was also working on the Nostalgia Press book collection of EC Comics, prompting visits to the Mad offices for several meetings with publisher Bill Gaines. The more conspicuous item among the oddities in his office was a fake window. It contained a life-size head of King Kong (sculpted by Sergio Aragones) looking through the window frame at Gaines.
Back at Topps in Brooklyn, I thought about the Kong window and wondered how something similar could be done as a Topps product. For its humorous posters, Topps used a newsprint paper stock that folded several times down to their standard small trading card package size. The visual concept I pitched was King Kong Wallpaper, a product which would use such newsprint posters to make giant-size b/w jigsaw puzzle pieces that could be collected and assembled to fill one entire wall of a kid's room. A single image of Kong could then loom in an immense fashion to give nightmares. Kids would love it; it would be the mothers who had the nightmares of Elmer's Glue all over the wall.
At Topps, puzzle pieces were considered the "B" side on a trading card, on the theory that no one wants to purchase individual jigsaw puzzle pieces. So my idea was shot down with the somewhat illogical question, "What's on the other side?" In retrospect, the solution would have been to simply package the folded newsprint puzzle posters with some colorful trading card item.
Maybe something similar happened at the Niagara Wallpaper Company. Someone thought how cool it would be to see a roomful of weird and outrageous Dick Tracy villains. Then some executive stepped in to get rid of the villains, making the final wallpaper bland and banal.
Labels: aragones, bill gaines, brooklyn, chester gould, dick tracy, king kong, mad, topps
¶ 6:27 AM 0 comments
Tuesday, September 01, 2009
Ellie Greenwich
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.The Charlotte Greig interview is here.
Good LA Times obit (8/26) by Ann Powers:
Good LA Times obit (8/26) by Ann Powers:
Greenwich emerged as a songwriter when America itself was on the cusp of everything, a whole set of conventions unspooling under the power of rock 'n' roll, the civil rights movement and the incipient counterculture. Her American polyglot upbringing prepared Greenwich, who died today at age 68 of a heart attack, for what she became: one of the great sound alchemists who turned the ambiguities of youth into the essence of American pop.
Able to sing, arrange and produce as well as pen indelible hits, Greenwich found her artistic home within New York's Brill Building, where she, her husband and songwriting partner, Jeff Barry, and their peers transformed an art form without making a big deal of it. She was a natural collaborator who could match wits with control freaks like Phil Spector and totally relate to the kids in the groups who recorded her songs.
She could write silly and she could write serious. But Greenwich's key works -- such classics as "Leader of the Pack," "Chapel of Love" and "River Deep, Mountain High" as well as more obscure ones like "Out in the Streets" and "Girls Can Tell" -- have a particular resonance that goes beyond catchiness or nostalgia.
Able to sing, arrange and produce as well as pen indelible hits, Greenwich found her artistic home within New York's Brill Building, where she, her husband and songwriting partner, Jeff Barry, and their peers transformed an art form without making a big deal of it. She was a natural collaborator who could match wits with control freaks like Phil Spector and totally relate to the kids in the groups who recorded her songs.
She could write silly and she could write serious. But Greenwich's key works -- such classics as "Leader of the Pack," "Chapel of Love" and "River Deep, Mountain High" as well as more obscure ones like "Out in the Streets" and "Girls Can Tell" -- have a particular resonance that goes beyond catchiness or nostalgia.
To read the full piece, go here.
1963 press photo of the Raindrops with Ellie Greenwich, Jeff Barry and Ellie's sister Laura. But now here's the mystery. Answer if you can. If Ellie did all overdubbing as it says in her official biography, then why is Laura in this Rainsdrops photograph? Possibly she lip-synched in performances as per a sentence in the Greig interview? (When Les Paul and Mary Ford performed for audiences, the multi-track sound of their recordings was simulated by having Mary's sister, Carol, sing into an offstage microphone.)
Labels: brill, ellie greenwich, raindrops
¶ 10:36 AM 2 comments
