Showing posts with label Dave Sim. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Dave Sim. Show all posts

13 November 2021

Eddie Campbell: Dave Sim & The Photorealist Style

The Strange Death of Alex Raymond
by Dave Sim & Carson Grubaugh


EDDIE CAMPBELL:
(from the forward to The Strange Death of Alex Raymond, 2021)
As a ten-year old, from the first time I saw Jack Kirby's signature on a comic, I was more interested in what the artist was doing than in the actions of Thor or any of the characters. Which is not unlike saying that a normally intelligent person would be more interested in what the Beatles were doing than in what Sgt. Pepper was up to. I followed Kirby's lines and shapes and figures around the page, and off the page. In later years my own comics have often been about artists and what they do and so I am drawn immediately to this one by Dave Sim.

Sim's subjects were the artists of what we call the photorealist style. The comics orthodoxy has tried to sideline it, but there has been a small revival of interest in the style. A history of it exists, but not all in one place, or in a book. Sim marks out the parameters for us, drawing himself as a cold case curmudgeon in a gallery, giving us an open-ended shaggy dog story that outlines a mystery, unsolvable at this late date. He circles around it in ever constricting manoeuvres into a subatomic world of artists feuds and jealousies and affairs and brushed inclines, taking apart the panels of old comics, copying them and delving into them for meaning. 


It's like the great English novel Tristram Shandy, in which every manner of digression keeps the narrator from arriving at the moment of his own birth. In this one, life is at its other end, with artists Alex Raymond and Stan Drake suspended in midair in a doomed sports car, a microsecond from catastrophe while Dave Sim ponders matters metaphysical, mechanical, conspiratorial, and art-historical. To say that it is all about the travelling and not the arriving could be considered a bad taste joke.

Sim was not content to evaluate this peculiar corner of art until he himself had mastered its technique, so he has thrown out all of his material prior to the instant of mastery, those situations and ruminations that we are certain we saw in the published part-issues and wonder why they've been ruthlessly culled. He was a pen guy in the 1990s when he and I crossed each other's paths several times, and now he masters the brush, like some ancient philosopher-calligrapher. And if he doesn't like me putting the thoughts in his balloon, I can only say that's what he's been doing with Alex Raymond, Stan Drake and the rest. All of them late, very. The obsession kills the obsessor. The book must not end.


Eddie Campbell is the celebrated creator of Alec and Bacchus, and collaborator (as artist) with Alan Moore on From Hell. His recent book The Goat-Getters explores the early years of the newspaper strip.

Dave Sim is the creator of Cerebus The Aardvark, a groundbreaking, 300-issue, monthly, self-published comic, which he completed with background artist Gerhard, between 1977 and 2004. 

FURTHER READING:
Interview: Campbell & Grubaugh discuss From Hell vs Strange Death Of Alex Raymond
Dave Sim
Carson Grubaugh
Living The Line Publishing
Living The Line Patreon
Cartoonist Kayfaybe Review


06 November 2021

Will Eisner (1917-2005): A Tribute by Dave Sim

Cerebus Jam #1 (1985)
by Dave Sim & Will Eisner

I remember first seeing Will Eisner's The Spirit in The Penguin Book of Comics when I was about 13 or 14 years old. The experience was a memorable one because The Spirit was so obviously neither fish nor foul. Structurally it was far more a comic book than a comic strip but it had appeared in newspapers, which only comic strips did. Because I was so firmly a devotee of comic books and only marginally interested in comic strips, the impact that first exposure had on me was notable. The writer, as I recall, was terrifically enthusiastic about the material. I do remember that. This was back in the days when the few books that were written about comics were all about comic strips - books where Superman and Batman were dealt with as peculiar outgrowths of a second-, if not third-rank comic strip mutation. So, I first knew Will Eisner as the comic book artist that comic strip fans enthused about.

Later I would read Jules Feiffer's groundbreaking seminal work on the comic book, The Great Comic Book Heroes, with his even more effusive enthusiasm for Will Eisner and The Spirit. There was a political schism between Feiffer and myself - he favours the early prewar Spirit while I'm more partial to the later studio work of 1946, 1947 and 1948.

What comes home to me in typing that simple observation on dichotomous preferences is that - while we are separated in age by decades - Feiffer and I both met Will when we were barely out of childhood and grew into full adulthood under his watchful (and here's the core of my point) non-patronising overview. It would have been far from inappropriate for both of us to have been patronised by Will Eisner. Whether in 1948 or 1974, who could match Eisner for stature, for influence and for sheer longevity? Yet I never saw him behave in a patronising fashion towards anyone - he never so much as betrayed a glimmering of amusement  at the inescapable fact that even the most senior members in the field were, in one sense or another, newcomers and novices in comparison to himself. He could look at Joe Kubert, for heaven's sake, and say, "Oh, right. I hired him to sweep the floors."


Will and I and so many others shared a profession and an all-consuming interest in the graphic narrative and an abiding faith in its limitless possibilities. That was all that it took to be treated as a peer and a contemporary by Will Eisner. If you cared deeply about the narrative form he cared most most about, he cared about you - and usually in direct proportion to your own level of devotion to the comic-book medium. In retrospect, it's not hard to see why, given that he had carried that profound level of faith in comic books across decades - virtually single-handedly and in the face of virtually universal disdain and derision (no one thought that the comic-book medium was as important as he though it was as early as he had thought it was and for as long as he thought it was). He carried the medium from obscurity and vituperation to acceptance and celebration...

...it's unthinkable what he accomplished.

I mean, it is literally impossible to retain an accurate mental image that encompasses, simultaneously, all of the many varied parameters and depths of his comic-book life and his comic-book career that was lived and conducted on the monomaniacal footing and scale that it was.

Nearly seven decades.

He invented and then refined most of the key components of the intrinsic language of the comic-book page over the course of a decade before anyone even recognised that there were components. He was the first comic-book creator on weekly display before a general interest audience (and 60 years later that's still a claim which is his alone!). He was there as an active participant in the birthing of the form itself and at the cusp on the medium's greatest financial success - when it had become virtually a license to print money and he and his partners jointly owned one of the few metaphorical printing presses which he had carefully assembled, lubricated and tweaked and fine-tuned - he quit what he was doing, walked three steps away and reinvented the medium in such a way that would better serve his creative purposes and interests. As Robert Blake once said when someone remarked on what an odd pair of companions he and Truman Capote made - the tough guy actor and the fey writer - "Don't kid yourself. He's got balls the size of your head."

Long before Scott McCloud popularised the phrase as a book title, Will Eisner was Reinventing Comics on a regular basis. The Eisner and Iger Studio was a way of reinventing comics, The Spirit  - in terms of form, content and distribution was a means of reinventing comics, P*S Magazine was a way of reinventing comics, the Harvey, Warren and Kitchen Sink reprinting of The Spirit were, each, a reinventing of comics - beginning in the mainstream, proceeding to the periphery and ending up in the rugged outlands of the field. The exact inverse of a careerist approach. A Contract With God was a reinvention of comics as the graphic novel. 

I'm not sure the he was too pleased that I considered the title story in A Contract With God to be his highest achievement in the field. With his relentless forward momentum and all-consuming need to produce The Mature Body of Work his newest offering was always the horse he had bet the metaphorical creative farm on. He didn't say it, but I could see it in his eyes:

"A Contract With God? Jeez, Dave, that was 25 years ago. You wait. The next one'll knock your socks off."

I stopped buying his work a few years ago when I realised that there was going to be a finite number of remaining projects that I would, likely, be able to count on the fingers of one hand. The depravation of not being current with his work ran a distant second behind my awareness of what it would be like to know that I'd never read a new Eisner book for the rest of my life. I had learned that hard lesson when I ploughed through the works of Dostoevsky in my 20s.


I remember when The Comics Journal printed a review of The Dreamer (was it Gary Groth who wrote it? I seem to remember that it was), sneering at it for its laundered view point of the '30s and the early history of the comic-book medium. It was perfectly brutal - where was the racism, the anti-Semitism the must have been all around and why was Eisner sugar-coating the reality instead of addressing it head-on? It was as much amounted to a bad review of Eisner himself for living too long and retaining too much in the way of discretion and tact and good manners in a world where those qualities were no longer valid. I wasn't alone in bristling on Will's behalf.

But give Will credit: He hadn't come as far as he had over those many years, arriving clear-eyed and lucid in the fourth quarter of the 20th century without having learned how to take a punch. It would never have occurred to him to close himself off to criticism or to be hurt and/or offended by a negative review. He was certainly entitled to do so by virtue of even a fraction of his seniority in the field, but he recognised that to walk that road would mean a living death if he allowed himself to retreat behind (what would undoubtedly have been) an impregnable wall of sycophancy.

As I recall Dropsie Avenue was the result. I ran across it the other day - it had been misplaced among my personal papers - and flipped it open, just intending to refresh my memory. 15 minutes later, I gave in and retreated to my room to read it in its entirety. The Jews were called hebe. The Italians wops. The Irish micks. And for the first time in an Eisner work, the motivating force of pure hatred and malice was moved to the forefront of the narrative, there to contend with, interweave and serve as a counterpoint to the higher aspirations of individual human beings which were Eisner's first and most genuine creative interest.


It was just another inconceivable facet of the multifaceted Mr. Will Eisner. In what other medium has anyone who has attained to the stature of living legend continued to be - not only open to criticism - but responsive to it? At a point where the years remaining in his creative life had dwindled to precious few, Eisner was amenable, with perfect equanimity to allow for the fact that his entire approach and execution on The Dreamer - which had taken up the better part of one of those few remaining years to complete - might have been a mistake and he was capable, again with perfect equanimity, of rethinking his approach from the ground up the next time out. His reputation in the avant garde took an awful beating, but everything was a learning experience for Will, everything was just grist for the mill.

For years, I thought it was unfortunate that there was never a magazine which reflected Will's sensibility the way  that The Comics Journal reflects our medium's Other Awards Namesake, Harvey Kurtzman's (more Kurtzman's sensibility as filtered through Robert Crumb and Art Spiegelman, but that's a subject for other time...) But reading Dropsie Avenue and remembering the creative, intellectual and visceral response that it represented I think things probably worked out for the best. A magazine that reflected Eisner's sensibility wouldn't have been able to provoke him into moving his work to another level and rethinking his approach that late in life. Will never wanted to be insulted from anything, least of all honest criticism. Ultimately, that was the source of his inclusiveness that left amateurs and professionals agog in his wake at the many conventions that he attended. There was only one playing field as far as he was concerned and it was completely level, with everyone contending for the same disposable income on the same comic-store shelf. He was more than happy to treat you as a peer and a contemporary if you were willing to extend him the same courtesy - to treat him as a peer and a contemporary and not just a living monument to be photographed next to. And if Frank Miller and Alan Moore and Neil Gaiman regularly kicked his ass in the sales department, mentally, inwardly he was always grinning from ear-to-ear and saying to them...

"You just wait. The next one'll knock your socks off."

Will Eisner (1917-2005) was a comics pioneer and creator of The Spirit, A Contact With God, To The Heart Of The Storm, Dropsie Avenue and many other stunning graphic novels. The Eisner Awards are named in tribute to his influence on the comics medium.

Dave Sim is the creator of Cerebus The Aardvark, a groundbreaking, 300-issue, monthly, self-published comic, which he completed with background artist Gerhard, between 1977 and 2004. This essay first appeared in The Comics Journal #267 in 2005.


13 September 2021

The Autobiographical Stories in Yummy Fur by Chester Brown (No. 38)

The Autobiographical Stories in Yummy Fur (1988-1993)
by Chester Brown

REVIEW BY CHARLES HATFIELD:
(from The 100 Best Comics of the Century! in The Comics Journal #210, 1999)
For all their candour, Chester Brown's memoirs are remarkably discreet. These quiet, artfully-shaped stories, which recall both the urgency of Justin Green and the mundane particularity of Harvey Pekar, exhibit economy, grace and a suggestive - even provoking - reticence. Beneath their quiet surfaces lies a strange disquiet, a probing restlessness which belies their fragile, minimalist drawings. What is left unsaid often matters just as much as what gets put down on paper.

Since their original publication, these first-person stories stories have been shaped into three books: The Playboy, I Never Liked You and The Little Man (a miscellany of tales, some fictional). These three represent an extraordinary period of development, as Brown subdued the extravagance of his early fantasies in favour of an equally provocative sense of restraint. He is still capable of shocking disclosure, but, unlike the latter instalments of Brown's fantasy opus Ed The Happy Clown, never turns aside important questions for the sake of a rude surprise.

Brown's memoirs do more than bare private nastiness to the world: they treat the ordinary, everyday encounters as occasions for the deepest questioning. For Brown, even the confused silences of adolescence are charged with moral significance - as shown, for instance, in the unsparing treatment of his failed teenage relationships in I Never Liked You. That book, which turns on the question of speech but climaxes with an awful, emotionally wrenching silence, is Brown's most affecting work to date, the masterwork toward which the earlier memoirs aim. Yet the earlier tales too are splendid, especially The Playboy and Danny's Story.

The Playboy captures Chester's awkward formative experiences with middlebrow pornography: there is no genuine catharsis, only a closeted shame and, in time, a blank evacuation of feeling. Here Brown ingeniously divides himself into an adolescent character and a gadded adult narrator, the later imagined as a hover, bat-winged devil whose mocking commentary underscores the depth of Chester's shame. Danny's Story, a boarding house anecdote, turns on the unwelcome intrusion of a neighbour whose sense of racial, cultural and sexual identity is entirely at odds with Chester's; it's a small masterpiece  of minute observation, one which turns up some of Chester's least attractive qualities. (It ends with Chester biting his neighbour and slamming the door in his face.) These stories wring significance from the smallest details. Taken in sequence, each successive story finds Brown doing more with less. 

Brown is not one to shy away from unpleasant detail, but seems to have little interest in making a shtick out of his unflinching "honesty". Each of his memoirs poses its own questions; each has its own thematic agenda and its own symmetry. They are all strong narratives, putting the lie to the idea that autobiography is for those who cannot construct real "stories". Taken together, these stories reveal an abiding interest in the ways people are shaped by their environment. Brown's powers of observation and his ability to conjure an environment in all its specificity are constant and breathtaking.


REVIEW BY SETH:
(from an interview in Destroy All Comics #2)
I really think Chester is a genius, and I don't know too many people I would class as a genius. He's a really individualistic thinker. I really feel his work comes out of the intellect... and things Chester has told me have certainly stuck in my mind and made me think about things I'm doing, especially from a technical stand point. I have so much respect for Chester that I will really take his opinion to heart.


DAVE SIM:
(from an interview, The Comics Journal #192)
...I was gratified to see Chester Brown's My Mother Was A Schizophrenic. Here's a comic book writer taking issue with an entire field of experts' opinion on schizophrenia. And, of course, he's reaping the whirlwind with a massive letter from one of those experts, having to patiently dismantle the guy's letter paragraph by paragraph. Chester, making full use of the potential both of the medium and unedited creative freedom. We can use a lot more of that in my view.


FURTHER READING:
Chester Brown at Patreon



10 August 2021

The Willie & Joe Cartoons by Bill Mauldin (No. 85)

The Willie & Joe Cartoons (World War II Era)
by Bill Mauldin

REVIEW BY ROBERT BOYD:
(from The 100 Best Comics of the Century! in The Comics Journal #210, 1999)
Bill Mauldin acquired his fame as an anti-authoritarian critic in the most autocratic of societies, the U.S. Army during World War II: in the panel cartoons he drew for military newspapers, he depicted the life of the "dogface" (foot soldier) the way it was. Rained on, shot at and kept awake in the trenches day and night, the combat soldier was wet, scared, city and tired all of the time; and Mauldin's spokesman - the scruffy, bristle-chinned, stoop-shouldered Willie and Joe in their wrinkled and torn uniforms - were taciturn but eloquent witnesses on behalf of the persecuted. Through simple combat-weary inertia, they defied pointless army regulation and rituals: they would fight the war, but they wouldn't keep their shoes polished. 

Their popularity was an affront to generally accepted notions of military propriety, but Mauldin never wavered even after General George S. Patton leaned on him. "I knew these guys best," Mauldin said, " and [the cartoons] gave the typical soldier an outlet for his frustrations, a chance to blow off steam." 

Returning to civilian life a celebrity, Mauldin continued the same satirical approach he'd followed in the military, but cartoons that were critical of post-war America were seen as "political" rather than "entertaining", and newspapers began dropping his feature, saying they had their own political cartoonists.  Then in 1958, he simply became a political cartoonist, replacing the dour Daniel Fitzpatrick at The St. Louis Post-Dispatch, and suddenly, Mauldin's liberal perspective had a home again. "I'm against oppression," he said, " - by whomever."


JEAN SCHULZ:
Although he was basically reserved, Sparky [Charles M. Schulz] was not afraid to publicly declare his admiration for fellow cartoonists and authors... I am not sure how Sparky and Bill first became acquainted, but I think it is likely that Sparky contacted an editor at United Features Syndicate, which then handled both Peanuts and Mauldin’s cartoons, and asked that an introduction be made. At any rate, Sparky and Bill had a telephone relationship for a number of years, and what I remember most are the times he would come home and share with me the war stories that Bill had regaled him with over the phone earlier that day. One of Mauldin’s best-known cartoons is of the soldier shooting his Jeep. Sparky has a bronze sculpture of that scene in his studio. Sparky admired Bill’s ability to be “in the face” of the officers, always sticking up for the little guy.


TODD DePASTINO:
Bill Mauldin retired from cartooning in 1991 after an injury to his drawing hand. Stricken by Alzheimer’s disease, he entered a nursing home in 2002. In the months before he died, old veterans and their relatives sent him over 10,000 cards and letters They thanked him for keeping their humanity alive during that most savage of wars. These tributes, more than any honor or award, rank Bill Mauldin as one of the greatest artists of the twentieth century. Bill Mauldin died on January 22, 2003. He is buried at Arlington National Cemetery.


DAVE SIM:
(from a letter to Bill Mauldin, reprinted in Cerebus Vol 16: The Last Day, 2004)
...the Willie and Joe cartoons still hold up as tip-top examples of the cartoonist's craft more than half a century later. Great composition, great expression, great body language, great execution, buoyant spontaneous brush strokes, spotting of blacks. I'll stop now before I start sporting a beret and a pointy little goatee. But to say the least, you always made the most difficult parts of cartooning look easy... If even a handful of my own readers still find my own work half so memorable decades after I have at last put down my pen and brush, I will count myself fortunate, indeed. To use the phrase which always denoted my father's highest accolade, Mr Mauldin, "Y'done good."


FURTHER READING:





20 July 2021

The Fourth World Comics by Jack Kirby (No. 88)

The Fourth World Comics (1970-1974)
by Jack Kirby

REVIEW BY CHARLES HATFIELD:
(from The 100 Best Comics of the Century! in The Comics Journal #210, 1999)
The superhero comics peaks in Jack Kirby's Fourth World, a cycle comprised of four titles published by DC Comics: New Gods, Forever People, Mister Miracle, and Kirby's bizarre run on the Superman's Pal Jimmy Olsen. Conceived by cartoonist/editor Kirby as a self-contained epic, this cycle sought to impose stronger continuity, and philosophical impetus, on a genre often dismissed as juvenile and absurd.

Freed from the the ironic hedging of Stan Lee (his long time scripted/editor at Marvel Comics), Kirby pitched superheroics toward allegory, freighting the genre with grim purpose. He gave his costumed heroes a new raison d'ĂŞtre: to save humankind from totalitarianism on a cosmic scale, personified by Darkseid - a granite-faced tyrant who represented a sterile, suffocating order, in opposition to Kirby's ideal of freedom. This was to be the great conflict between Life and "Anti-Life".

On the side of Life were such characters as Darkseid's tortured son Orion, his foster son Scott Free (alias Mister Miracle), a band of hippies called the Forever People, and a buglike hive dweller named Forager; on the side of Anti-Life were such monsters as the brutish Kalibak, the sadistic aesthete Desaad, and the despotic harridan, Granny Goodness. It was a nightmarish vision, tempered somewhat by Kirby's native hopefulness and respect for youth.

Though scuppered by the cancellation of New Gods and Forever People, the Fourth World represents Kirby at his Zenith. Its stories are some of the most frenzied and eccentric in the superhero tradition; they are also some of the most personal and deeply felt. The work sizzles: there are electric bursts of violence, wrenching transformations, rude metaphors. There are also unexpected pauses and complexities. Above all, there is the spectacle of Kirby's style - looming, monolithic, raw - in search of a fitting subject.


REVIEW BY DAVE SIM:
(from 'The 2000 Virtual Kirby Tribute Panel' in The Jack Kirby Collector #27, February 2000)
Had he known that the direct market was only six or seven yeas away from coming into existence, he might have bided his time - or divided his time between his Marvel workload and his Fourth World epic, using the former to keep food on the table and getting the latter ready to sell to the comic book stores on a non-returnable basis. 20-20 hindsight. I knew enough not to trust any company to have Cerebus' or my best interests at heart when I decided to turn it into an epic 26-year story. Kirby didn't have that option. At the time he started the Fourth World epic he had to trust somebody and the only somebody besides the company he was working for was DC. He trusted that he would make enough money for them that they would see financing the whole epic from start to finish and then keeping it in print to be a smart idea. Of course what he didn't take into account was that a corporate motivation in hiring him away from Marvel had as much to do with hurting Marvel as it did with helping their own bottom line. From DC's standpoint, I think, Jack's departure didn't hurt Marvel enough to warrant seeing the Fourth World through - as Mark Evanier had pointed out and I believe him, the books were still profitable. It was a tragedy and it was very, very regrettable, but that is what corporations are like.


FURTHER READING:


13 July 2021

A Contract With God by Will Eisner (No. 57)

A Contract With God (1978)
by Will Eisner

REVIEW BY DAVID RUST:
(from The 100 Best Comics of the Century! in The Comics Journal #210, 1999)
Will Eisner's breakout book A Contract With God & Other Tenement Stories has a contentious claim to be considered the first graphic novel. This makes it important as a historical curiosity, but hardly accounts for its inclusion on this list. Much more importantly, it marks a master craftsman's first attempt to turn the comics medium from genre-based storytelling to straight, literate fiction. As great as all those old Spirit stories are, Contract is Eisner showing us comics can be art and self-expression as well as entertainment.

The book collects four tales of urban life in a seamless blend of social realism and melodrama. Set in the same building in a New York Jewish ghetto, these stories fictionalise events Eisner remembers happening around him during his childhood. 

In the title piece, Frimme Herch believes he is favoured by God until the death of his daughter, which he interprets as God's betrayal. Herch becomes a financial success, but his loss of faith prevents him from happiness. In an ironic twist, Herch regains his faith but is them seemingly struck down by a God angered at Herch's presumptions.

In The Street Singer, a failed opera diva seduces the title character and plans to live out her failed dreams by guiding the younger man's career. The two are clearly using one another for their own purposes but manage to give one another hope in their otherwise bleak lives. Born losers, the star crossed pair become lost from one another in the big city and never get the opportunity to pursue their dreams. 

The Super manages to arouse sympathy for the grouchy, porn-addicted building manager who lusts after a young tenant. Eisner is not interested in heroes or villains, and the characteristics which would make the man repugnant in most stories are coupled with vulnerability and humanity.

In the final story, Cookalein, Eisner casts his sympathetic eye for human foibles on a group of urban residents summering in the country who grope about in clumsy searches for love, sex and social advancement.

The specificity of setting lends authenticity to the universality of Eisner's concerns, which include love, loss, alienation, hope and despair. Eisner's formal creativity and mastery of atmosphere invest these tales with emotional power. The novelty of the format aside, A Contract With God is a moving and compelling book, and the masterpiece of one of the medium's first true artists.


WILL EISNER:
(discussing the death of his daughter Alice from leukaemia)
My grief was still raw. My heart still bled. In fact, I could not even then bring myself to discuss the loss. I made Frimme Hersh’s daughter an “adopted child.” But his anguish was mine. His argument with God was also mine. I exorcised my rage at a deity that I believed violated my faith and deprived my lovely 16-year-old child of her life at the very flowering of it.


REVIEW BY FRANK MILLER:
(from an interview in The Comics Journal #209, December 1998)
Well, a lot of it to me gets back to Eisner. He still in many ways is a framework for me, and I think at least to date, probably the most important piece of work he did was A Contract With God. Certainly in terms of influence, because I wasn't the only one who sat up and took notice when that book came out. It had a profound effect on how I approached not just the fate of my work, but the kind I wanted to do. I wanted to work much more long form. That's ironic, because it was a series of short stories. But I think he quietly started a revolution. He's been relentless in pursuing it.


REVIEW BY SCOTT McCLOUD:
(from the introduction to the 1997 edition of A Contract With God)
I’m writing this in 2016, more than a decade after Will Eisner died. The potential of comics is being demonstrated daily in ways Eisner anticipated when he created A Contract With God nearly forty years ago, but also in ways he could’ve hardly imagined. And of course, inevitably, the book itself will suffer the fate of any first-of-its-kind pioneer. It’s been joined now by so many of its kind that it’s easy to lose it in the crowd. There are now graphic novels with ever more complex formal ambitions, with subtly written dialogue, up-to-date sensibilities, pitch-perfect irony, and politically urgent subject matter. Graphic novels proliferate and improve with every passing year. But they’re still branches on an immense family tree that was once just a sapling - planted in soil he always knew was fertile.


REVIEW BY DAVE SIM:
(from an interview in The Comics Journal #83, August 1983)
I kept putting off buying A Contract With God for a long time because I knew it would be a long time before I saw another Contract With God, and when I read it, it was just like, Oh, if there were only 18 things coming out like this.


REVIEW BY CHESTER BROWN:
(from an interview in The Comics Journal #135, April 1990)
Another bridge type book was A Contract With God by Will Eisner, which I picked up when it first came out back in '79... it was an important book too, in making me see that there were other types of ways of doing comics. There were other kinds of comics that were possible... here he was doing something different, and something that wasn't about a character with a mask on his face. That was neat stuff, and kind of eye-opening at the time.


FURTHER READING:

25 June 2021

Master Race by Bernard Krigstein & Al Feldstein (No. 76)

Master Race (1955)
by Bernard Krigstein & Al Feldstein
(Impact #1 cover art by Jack Davis)

REVIEW BY TOM SPURGEON:
(from The 100 Best Comics of the Century! in The Comics Journal #210, 1999)
Master Race is one of the justifiably exalted comics of the 20th Century, and a stunning showcase of comics storytelling for artist Bernard Krigstein. Intended for an issue of Shock SuspenStories, Master Race appeared in the first issue of the New Direction EC title Impact, and remains its most memorable story.

The script, credited to the underrated Al Feldstein, tells the story of a chance meeting between a former concentration camp commandant and a camp survivor on a New York subway. The encounter ends with the former Nazi's death. As a straight piece of drama, Master Race is a solid, capable work of fiction. Feldstein's script is professionally forceful and provocative, while Krigstein's illustrations serve the story's dramatic highlights perfectly: the depictions of both the chase and the commandants crimes are magnificently expressive without veering into melodrama.

However, Master Race is best remembered for Krigstein's exploration of the possibilities of narrative in comics form. Expanding the script from six to eight pages, Krigstein opened up the story's graphic possibilities. His solutions to various storytelling problems are incredibly sophisticated: radical shifts in perspective between the pursuer and the pursued; building mood through panel size and text placement; switching from objective to subjective viewpoints; and showing dramatic highs by slowing down the action across a series of panels. The panels where Krigstein shows the passing of the subway cars through repeating images within the same panel are so astonishing, so adept, and so perfect they serve as arguments in and of themselves that Master Race is a rare artistic achievement by one of comics greatest forward thinkers.

Master Race is also one of the most studied comics of all time, most notably in the seminal piece of comics criticism "An Examination of Master Race" (by John Benson and David Kasakove, working in part from an Art Spiegelman essay and close reading of the story). A perfect marriage of artist, approach, and subject matter, Master Race rewards the constant reconsideration it richly deserves.


REVIEW BY NEIL GAIMAN:
One of the most important stories in the history of comics and the history of the art of comics...


REVIEW BY ART SPIEGELMAN:
...I was a cartooning major at Art and Design in 1963. Only vaguely aware of Krigstein's comics, I gave him a wide berth. He was a small, barrel-chested man with a reputation among my illustration-major friends as a tough teacher, humorless and completely dismissive of comics. I was delighted to learn from Sadowski's book that the initials Krigstein used when signing his early superhero pages, "B. B. Krig," stood for the nickname he had earned in the Army: Ballbuster.

I met him only once, in the early seventies. John Benson, the editor of an EC fanzine called Squa Tront, wanted to expand and publish a panel-by-panel analysis of "Master Race" that I had written in 1967 as a college term paper. We went to visit Krigstein at his painting studio, on East Twenty-third Street, so I could read it to him and get his responses. Krigstein at first demurred that those days were long behind him and he didn't remember much about the work. As I began reading, he entered into the analysis avidly, acknowledging a reference to Futurism in one panel, to Mondrian in another, denying a reference to George Grosz in yet another. He basked when I pointed to a visual onomatopoeia that conjured up a subway's rumble. It was as if messages he'd sent off in bottles decades earlier had finally been found.

At the end of the paper, I had compared his approach to that of some important contemporaries whom I also admired, including Harvey Kurtzman and Will Eisner. When I read that paragraph, Krigstein darkened. "Eisner!" he shouted. "Eisner is the enemy! When you are with me, I am the only artist!" He yanked me further into his studio and pointed at the walls. "Look!" he roared. "You see these paintings?" I saw several large, molten, and lumpy Post-Impressionist landscapes in acidic colors. "These are my panels now!" His voice betrayed all the anguish of a brokenhearted lover.


REVIEW BY DAVE SIM:
All they have to do is give him his own book, as they did with Kurtzman, and comic books could have jumped three or four decades in maturity inside of a year. No go. In fact, just the opposite happens. They start cutting the page count. To me it was an object lesson in the fact that innovation and business interests, while completely compatible are seen by businessmen as completely incompatible... If in later years, long after I'm dead, someone sees something in my work that seems - to them - as innovative as Master Race seemed - and seems - to me... Well, I'm pretty sure they will also see that what I achieved was only possible through self-publishing and, hopefully, I will have saved a handful of future creators from hitting a brick wall at their innovative peak that Feldstein and Gaines forced Krigstein to hit at his own creative high point.


FURTHER READING:



Master Race
Impact #1, EC Comics, 1955
Original art by Bernard Krigstein









22 May 2021

The Recommended Reading List

Comic-creators recommend their favourite comics!
This list is a work-in-progress and will be updated regularly.


CHESTER BROWN:
A Contract With God by Will Eisner
Frank by Jim Woodring
Little Orphan Annie by Harold Gray


EDDIE CAMPBELL:
Ethel & Ernest by Raymond Briggs
Palestine by Joe Sacco
Prince Valiant by Harold Foster
The Strange Death of Alex Raymond by Dave Sim & Carson Grubaugh


DAN CLOWES:
Barnaby by Crockett Johnson
Dirty Plotte by Julie Doucet
MAD edited by Harvey Kurtzman


ROBERT CRUMB:
American Splendor by Harvey Pekar
Binky Brown Meets The Holy Virgin Mary by Justin Green
Dirty Plotte by Julie Doucet
Harvey Kurtzman's Jungle Book by Harvey Kurtzman
MAD edited by Harvey Kurtzman
The Autobiographical Comics of Spain Rodriguez
The Buddy Bradley Stories by Peter Bagge


WILL EISNER:
Madman's Drum by Lynd Ward
The Cartoon History of the Universe by Larry Gonick
Understanding Comics by Scott McCloud


NEIL GAIMAN:
Alec by Eddie Campbell
Cages by Dave McKean
Frank by Jim Woodring
Master Race by Bernard Krigstein & Al Feldstein
Pogo by Walt Kelly
Tantrum by Jules Feiffer
Understanding Comics by Scott McCloud
Watchmen by Alan Moore & Dave Gibbons


SCOTT McCLOUD:
A Contract With God by Will Eisner
Frank by Jim Woodring
The Spirit by Will Eisner


MIKE MIGNOLA:
Murky World by Richard Corben


FRANK MILLER:
A Contract With God by Will Eisner
Calvin & Hobbes by Bill Watterson
EC War Comics by Harvey Kurtzman & Others


ALAN MOORE:
Alec by Eddie Campbell
American Splendor by Harvey Pekar
Arcade: The Comics Revue edited by Art Spiegelman & Bill Griffith
Dark Knight by Frank Miller
Grendel: Devil By The Deed by Matt Wagner
Hellboy by Mike Mignola
Love & Rockets by Jaime Hernandez
Luther Arkwright by Bryan Talbot
MAD edited by Harvey Kurtzman
Maus by Art Spiegelman
Palestine by Joe Sacco
Tales of Telguuth by Steve Moore
The Book of Jim by Jim Woodring
The Loneliness of a Long-Distance Cartoonist by Adrian Tomine
The Sketchbooks of Robert Crumb
The Spirit by Will Eisner
The Suttons by Phil Elliott
Understanding Comics by Scott McCloud


CHARLES M. SCHULZ:
Barnaby by Crockett Johnson
Thimble Theatre by E.C. Segar


SETH:
Peanuts by Charles M. Schulz
The Autobiographical Stories in Yummy Fur by Chester Brown


DAVE SIM:
A Contract With God by Will Eisner
Fourth World Comics by Jack Kirby
Master Race by Bernard Krigstein & Al Feldstein
The Autobiographical Stories in Yummy Fur by Chester Brown
The Willie & Joe Cartoons of Bill Mauldin


ART SPIEGELMAN:
Binky Brown Meets The Holy Virgin Mary by Justin Green
City of Glass by Paul Karasik & David Mazzucchelli
Harvey Kurtzman's Jungle Book
Krazy Kat by George Herriman
Little Nemo in Slumberland by Winsor McKay
Little Orphan Annie by Harold Gray
Madman's Drum by Lynd Ward
Master Race by Bernard Krigstein & Al Feldstein
Peanuts by Charles M. Schulz
Plastic Man by Jack Cole
The Autobiographical Comics of Spain Rodriguez
The Bungle Family by George Tuthill
The Mishkin Saga by Kim Deitch with Simon Deitch
Thimble Theatre by E.C. Segar
Uncle Scrooge by Carl Barks
Understanding Comics by Scott McCloud
Watchmen by Alan Moore & Dave Gibbons


ALEX TOTH:
Wash Tubbs / Captain Easy by Roy Crane


CHRIS WARE:
Binky Brown Meets The Holy Virgin Mary by Justin Green
Gasoline Alley by Frank King
Krazy Kat by George Herriman
Peanuts by Charles M. Schulz
Zap Comix by Robert Crumb & Others


BILL WATTERSON:
Krazy Kat by George Herriman
Pogo by Walt Kelly