William Horberg

Fair and Unbalanced

I was talking to a screenwriter the other day about the idea of false equivalency; how we are programmed to think in the dichotomy of "on the one hand, on the other hand" or, put more simply, "there are two sides to every story."

I guess we are also programmed to see what we want to see and hear what we want to hear, as it wasn't long afterwards that I was reading David Mazzucchelli's new graphic novel "Asterios Polyp", and found this simple illustration that seemed to jump out at me, as I felt that the book was reading my mind, and expressed in simple line drawings and word balloons this idea more clearly and eloquently than I could.

 

But in your experience, how often would you say this "system" isn't mistaken for reality, or for a way of getting at or describing the "truth"? 

We see it all the time in journalism, where a fact is given equal weight as an opinion, and placed in false opposition to each other. Our post-modern world is one of intensely competing narratives, and everyone is a storyteller, trying to wrangle the chaos of life to fit into their own narrative.

It is hard to see the sphere instead of the line, but it is worth the effort sometimes.

william

Un-Covered

Thanks to reader Snippety Gibbet for turning me on to a cool blog called "Covered" which is a collection of classic comic book covers redrawn by contemporary artists.

Totally up my alley!

The drawing above is not from a comic book cover so it wouldn't be eligible for inclusion on "Covered" according to the site rules made up by blogger and curator Robert Goodin.

But it was inspired by the cover of a book called "Space Happy" that I saw lavishly reproduced in "Illustration" magazine as part of an article by a woman who came to Chicago in 1979 on a collector's mission and stumbled upon a warehouse full of mint condition illustrated children's books from the 50's and 60's as part of the defunct operations of a publisher named the Merrill Company. 

She ended up buying the business and trucking the books home with her and wrote this interesting article about her experience. And best of all shared dozens of illustrations from the covers of the books in her collection in the magazine. You can order a back copy of the magazine online here.

Enjoy!

william

More Emsh

Here are a few sketches drawn from pictures in the Emshwiller book - Infinity x Two - as a homage to this interesting artist and restless creator. 

And check out this quote from Ed Emshwiller written back in the late '50's or early '60's. Man oh man, what would EMSH make of our hyper-commercial cultural landscape today? 

I can't imagine having a conversation with too many folk today about the virtue of bewilderment as the most honest position of the artist or storyteller as he approaches his subject? And this was a guy working in the mainstream of popular culture and mass appeal genre forms as an artist and illustrator for most of the major science fiction magazines and trade paperbacks of his era. 

What an interesting cat!

william

Jack and Jill

Hey kids! 

I wanted to share with you the last few of the used books I found while browsing away here in Southern Australia's nooks and crannies. This one is such a relentlessly cheerful effort that I had to have it. It is an Annual, and contains lots of cartoons and illustrations by various artists, but all in a similar vein of childhood whimsy.

I wonder if Henry Darger ever got a hold of this book while he was collecting scraps of paper ephemera and storing them away in his cramped janitor's apartment in Chicago in the 1950's and '60's ? - it looks like it could be the source material or inspiration for some of his fantastic naive artwork featuring storybook children.

I especially love the Ex Libris bookmark in the end paper. Definitely want to copy that out keep it and use it on a few volumes for posterity!

Enjoy!

william

Ronald Searle

Ronald Searle is an illustrator and cartoonist who was born in England. His birthday is one day after mine on March 3, but 39 years before me, in 1920. That makes him 89 years old at present, but his drawings and his wit are timeless.

I found a beautiful edition of one of his books - The Female Approach - a collection of cartoons, down here in a small village outside of Melbourne, and share a few of the ones I liked best with you here. I've kept all the white space on the page in order to preserve his own compositional eye, so scroll down and keep going!

Many of his most famous drawings featured the girls from St.Trinian's School, which was his own source of endless humor, as the first three panels here attest.

But I also like the puddle of tears for the ocularist going out of business.

I'll have to keep an eye out (excuse the pun) for more of Searle's books down here. I suspect as a British humorist he had a wider audience in the commonwealth countries, as I never came across his illustrations back home.

Enjoy!

william horberg

My Uncle Dan

I don't have an Uncle Dan, but after discovering this treasure trove of old children's books in a small used book store in the scenic village of Woodsend, about five kilometers west of Mt. Macedon, Victoria, Southern Australia, I wish I did.

Or to put it another way, I didn't have an Uncle Dan, but I do now. 

Read on to find out more...

Here is one peach of a book I found that contains a lavishly illustrated collection of sixteen of Grimm's fairy tales.

The artwork is by one F.W. Darlington, here illustrating the story of The Twelve Brothers.

And here illustrating Rapunzel, as if the lass with elevator of golden tresses needed any introduction. 

I love this picture from the Elves and the Shoemaker. If you like Darlington's drawings, he also illustrated an edition of Robert Browning's classic The Pied Piper of Hamelin, which you can get online here.

So where does my Uncle Dan fit in? 

With his three piece suit, a bow tie, and his pipe, he's right at home somewhere between the book title and the publisher on the inside page of this fragile old edition, from a shop called Harper of Holloway. 

I think they were a Canadian publisher. I wonder how and when this book found it's way down to Woodsend, Australia and into the hands of some deserving and enchanted reader? Or who Uncle Dan was, and what other books were put out under his benevolent gaze?

But, as they say..."that's another story"...

william

A Look Back at Harvey Kurtzman

Harvey and his daughter attending a ComiCon in the early 1970's.

I have been blogging about MAD magazine founder and comic book genius Harvey Kurtzman for this last week, and today I stumbled across an appreciation of Harvey by someone much more qualified than I to write about him.

Terry Gilliam came to New York in the early 60's and worked for Kurtzman at his then current magazine venture, Help! Here is his first hand account of that first encounter which had such a formative influence on his own creative journey as artist and filmmaker and Python member. Turns out Gilliam even met John Clesse through his work producing what he calls fumetti for Help! - little comic photo strips - which inspired Gilliam to take the eventual leap into making movies.

From The Guardian:

Then Harvey started Help! magazine. I just discovered it one day, and said, hello, what’s this? For me, the best thing about Help! were the fumetti, the funny photo-stories that Harvey was doing. I’d never seen anything like that before. So we started doing those. That was the next step for me towards film-making: suddenly we were going out and doing photo-shoots, dressing people up and finding locations and telling stories. I started sending the magazines to Harvey, because I just wanted him to see who was out there copying him, the monster he’d helped create. He sent back a really nice letter which was the beginning of the end, or the beginning of the beginning.

When I graduated from university I really didn’t know what I was going to do. But I wrote to Harvey and said, ‘I’m gonna come to New York. I’d love to come and meet you.’ And he wrote me back saying, ‘Don’t bother, kid. There’s no job here, there’s nothing, it’s a hard place.’ But nevertheless, I went.

So we agreed to meet, at the Algonquin Hotel. Now, I was a great fan of the Algonquin, because that was where the Round Table was in the Twenties, where Dorothy Parker, Robert Benchley and George Kaufman used to hang out and be witty and write for the New Yorker.

I got there and I remember going up the stairs, this callow youth from California, and I knock on the door and the door opens and inside this suite were gathered together all of my god hero cartoonists. And then Harvey turns up. He was much smaller than I expected; most of my heroes are. But it was wonderful. Harvey was really sweet and enthusiastic. And standing next to him was a guy named Charles Alverson, the assistant editor of Help!, who had just decided to quit. And they were looking for somebody to replace him. So I got the job just like that.

At Help! I had to do everything. I had to deal with whatever went on with the magazine, so I’d be on the phone talking to people in a solemn voice: ‘Ah, yes, this is Mr Gilliam, the assistant editor of Help! magazine, I’ll have that package over to you in about, oh, 15 minutes, I’ll tell the boy to bring it in.’ But that boy was me. And I was making two dollars less than I would’ve made on the dole every week. It was wonderful.

What I really loved was doing the fumetti, because I had to be, in a sense, the producer. So I would get the actors together, the props together, the costumes, find locations. Some of this was done with Harvey, sometimes it was me out there on my own. Henry Jaglom, the film director, was in one of our fumetti; so was John Cleese, which is how we met. Once we were doing this fumetto about gangsters; we needed a Mr Big and one of our ‘gun molls’ happened to be dating Woody Allen. He was perfect, although Harvey was wonderfully bemused about who this guy was.

Kurtzman's later work, especially his drawing the Little Annie Fanny cartoon for Hefner's Playboy Magazine felt like a fall from grace for those who missed the razor sharp wit of his Mad, Trump, Humbug and Help! days. But his legacy and influence clearly live on, as Gilliam's eloquent appreciation amply demonstrates.

Enjoy!

William

Harvey, Help! and Humbug

The late 1950's and early1960's found Harvey Kurtzman bouncing around a few various magazine ventures. Trump, Help, Humbug. He never really recaptured the glory of his triumph as the editor of MAD, but he did continue to foster a graphic style that was in the spirit of those swinging times!

Talk about In Your Face, imagine the cover of this issue of Help! magazine staring at your from your local newsstand?

Here is another of the many cool work-in-progress sketches featured in the book The Art of Harvey Kurtzman, this one for the cover of Humbug Magazine.

When Kurtzman defected from Mad he was backed by Hugh Hefner in the short-lived publication of Trump. He was joined by MAD alumnus Al Jaffee, Jack Davis, and Arnold Roth. 

Both Trump Magazine and Humbug have also been collected and repackaged in box sets for those of you who want ALL Kurtzman ALL of the time!!

william

Portrait of Harvey

I love this portrait of the editorial staff of Trump magazine, one of the various ventures that Harvey Kurtzman embarked on after he left MAD Magazine in the mid-1950's. 

Among those pictured are great comic book artists Wally Wood and Jack Davis, both of whom Kurtzman had worked with at EC Comics in the early 1950's. Wood was the boy wonder of comics, who really created the MAD parody style working for Kurtzman when he wrote and illustrated his classic "Superduperman" story, but he had a sad life in his later career and tragically shot himself in 1981.

As for Harvey, in one of the great self-portraits of someone willing to send himself up along with the rest of he world, he can be seen as the pair of feet jutting into the corner of the frame. Passed out on the "ink" that he and his fellow cartoonists have clearly been swilling!

william

The Mad Genius of Mad Magazine

With this one piece of artwork, the cover of the first issue of MAD, shown here in a rough draft from the new book "The Art of Harvey Kurtzman", a new era in pop culture was ushered in, starting as a new comic book line for publisher William Gaines' EC comics which hit the streets in the Fall of 1952.

Kurtzman was the editor and creative driving force behind this new satirical voice. His next innovation was to take MAD from comic book to a standard magazine format starting with issue #24 in July 1955, a brilliant tactical maneuver to outflank the dogs of censorship that came down hard on a comic book culture perceived to be out of control by the guardians of taste and morality at that time. 

Remember Dr. Frederick Wertham's scolding book "The Seduction of the Innocent"? Kurtzman and Gaines et al were right at the center of the mob of seducers he was taking aim at.

Although it seems like Harvey Kurtzman WAS Mad Magazine, in fact his tenure there was fairly brief. Kurtzman left MAD after issue #28, July 1956 and was replaced by another really cool artist, Al Feldstein with issue #29, September 1956.

The first issue of Mad comics cost a dime when it came out but sells today for over $7,500.

Perhaps one of Kurtzman's most memorable moves was to adopt and create one of the lasting icons of MAD magazine and American pop culture in what became MAD's official mascot, Alfred E. Neuman. The character's first appearance in the comic book was on the cover of Mad 21 (March 1955), as a tiny image as part of a mock ad. A rubber mask bearing his likeness with "idiot" written underneath was offered for $1.29.

Neuman's third appearance was in the illustrated border of the first magazine version of Mad #24 (July 1955) with his now-familiar signature phrase "What, me worry?" written underneath.

The best and most widely-accepted image of Alfred E. Neuman, from which all images of the goofy kid who says, What, Me Worry? are derived, is the Alfred E. Neuman for President drawing by Norman Mingo from issue #30.

william

Tomorrow: Life after MAD for Kurtzman