Michael Sporn Animation – Splog

- Today is Veteran’s Day, and what a way to celebrate than to let Harvey Kurtzman and Jack Davis supply us with a few good War Stories. To that end, Bill Peckmann contributes #6 in this series of a collaboration between the two. Over to Bill:

- Here is the first Harvey Kurtzman cover for his very ambitious “Civil War” series that was supposed to run in EC’s FRONTLINE COMBAT and TWO-FISTED TALES titles. In 1952, Harvey’s creative juices knew no bounds, this war series debuted just before MAD No. 1 came out some months later. As kids in those days, way before there was colored TV with the History Cable Channel, we were very lucky to have Harvey at the helm of his war comics to give us a slice of history that wasn’t as dry or dusty as it seemed to be in our school books. The series was to run seven issues to cover the whole Civil War. Sadly, only three issues were completed before both FRONTLINE and TWO-FISTED titles folded.

Just as Jack Davis did the very first story in MAD No. 1, he also did the first story in the first “Civil War” issue. Jack was a great opening act, what better way to get someone to buy the comic book than to see his first page, splash page, grabber.

Magazine Cover
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Intro art by John Severin. His love for the subject matter shows!
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The first Davis story also flows perfectly into the second Severin and
Elder story. The terrific art is done by John Severin (penciler) and
Bill Elder (inker). As with Jack Davis, the strength of Kurtzman’s writing
and rough laying out comes roaring through.
Kudos again to Marie Severin’s coloring!
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Here’s Jack’s cover for the third and last issue of Harvey’s “Civil War” series.
It was TWO-FISTED TALES No. 35. A little more than a year and a half after
it had started, the planned seven issue series was over and never completed.
(Us old EC fans always dreamt of what those last four issues would have looked like.)

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This is Jack’s rendering of the battle of “Chancellorsville”. It’s the last story in the
last issue of the “Civil War”series. Quite a visual high point for everyone working on it,
especially the dramatic coloring.

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It’s a bit ironic that in the last panel, of the last story, of the last issue in the series,
that Harvey would miss one of the very few typos that ever graced his books.
“1893″ should read “1863″, go figure…

Many thanks to Bill Peckmann for sharing this artwork with us.

- The collaboration between Harvey Kurtzman and Jack Davis has proven to be a very fertile one.. Bill Peckmann has continued to send more material to extend the idea, and I take delight in posting it. Bill wrote the accomp;anying notes:

In really reaching and stretching to show more Harvey and Jack “firsts”, I’m sending you the first two covers that Jack did for Harvey’s war comics “Two-Fisted Tales” and “Frontline Combat” along with a Harvey and Jack story from each issue.

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Here is the cover of “Two-Fisted Tales” No. 30, 1952.
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This is the inside cover of “Two-Fisted”. One of the
big treats of EC Comics were their “in house” ads for
other titles. Here is the ad for MAD No.1 done by Jack.
It was great the way EC put faces to your favorite artists.
I’d say the roots for Jack’s future TV GUIDE covers are right here.
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Skipping ahead twenty-two years, (a break in the action)
I’m inserting a Jack Davis TV GUIDE cover from 1974.
(It also has a Korean War theme.)
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Harvey and Jack’s story from No. 30.
(They certainly gave the great aviation cartoonist,
Alex Toth a run for his money!)
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Jack’s first “Frontline Combat” cover, No. 11, 1953.
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Inside front cover of “FC”. It’s an ad for MAD No. 2 done by EC great, Bill Elder.
(Sorry about the front cover colors bleeding through.)
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“Sailor!”, Harvey and Jack’s collaboration for “FC” No. 11.
It shows the horrors of war (as much as you could in a
comic book back then), the realism that was to come later
in films like “Saving Private Ryan”.
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The colors, excitement and dynamics of the cover are just terrific.
Jack makes it look so easy.
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Back in the days before comic book reprints, fans had to do with
whatever copies they had collected. One way to keep comics from
getting battered and tattered was to have them bound in volumes.
Working with Harvey and Jack on animated projects back in the
early 70′s, I was very fortunate and they were very kind to put their
John Hancocks in my bound volume of “Frontline Combat”.

Many thanks to Bill Peckmann for sharing the material and putting it all together.

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- The series we’ve been posting of the collabortion between Harvey Kurtzman and Jack Davis seems to be a popular item. This gives us lots of encouragement to go on with it. Hence, here’s part 4. These were scanned and sent to me for posting by the brilliant Bill Peckmann. From here on I turn it all over to Bill:

This extended part 4 of Harvey and Jack is a big shout out thank you to Tom Hatchman. After his kind kudos to Kurtzman and Davis, (and it also being the end of the baseball season with the World Series), what better way than to try to add to that list of “firsts” of that dynamic duo than with Jack’s first cover for MAD Comics. It’s a dandy! (It’s #2, Dec.-Jan. 1953, and was his only cover for the “comic book” line/title.)

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The cover story by Harvey and Jack is one of their best.
It’s worth studying because of Harvey’s layouts with their
exceptional continuity and his gorgeous page and panel designs.
The man always had a camera cranking in his head, unbelievable.
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This is also one of the first baseball/sports stories that Jack
did for the comics. His drawings are just exploding with life,
their wonderful dimensional quality and his great dexterity of
where to put that black ink with that super brush of his.
This story also put him on that long road of becoming one of
the best “sports” cartoonists in the business!
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Again, also what makes this story so pleasurable is
the terrific coloring by a young Marie Severin.
She was the colorist for the whole EC Comics line up,
no small feat, she always made the EC line stand out
from the rest of the comics on the rack. They absolutely
grabbed you first because of the covers she colored!
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This is Jack’s first cover for MAD Magazine, # 27, April 1956.
(A little over three years since he did his first MAD Comic Book cover.)
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Inside MAD # 27 we find two features by Harvey and Jack.
In “Football” jack pulls out all of the stops with his great eye
for caricaturing details like the football uniforms.
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This is the second feature of the magazine and
Jack is becoming quite the master of two tones
of gray Craft Tint, à la Roy Crane.
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This third feature of MAD # 27 is neither Harvey nor Jack but it’s
definitely worth sneaking in here. As a kid, I’ll always remember
and love Harvey for showing us great cartoons that were done
before he was doing great cartoons, way before! What dusty bins
and archives he went through, I have no idea, but the ones he
selected held up the some odd 50 years after they were originally
printed, and by George, they still hold up the some 50 years after that!
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To any dog owner, the dog poses in here are top notch!
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Before getting into today’s post, I received some sad news last night. Hal Silvermintz, the designer and force in NY animation during the the 60s and 70s, passed away at his home in Florida. Hal was key to Stars and Stripes Productions Forever and Perpetual Motion Pictures. I’ll have more about him in tomorrow’s post, but I wanted to get the word out there.

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- Today, we continue our focus on the collaboration between Harvey Kurtzman and Jack Davis. Individually, each is a brilliant artist, together , they create even more brilliant work. Bill Peckmann continues this series sending me some excellent examples; for that contribution I’m most grateful.

Bill also supplies the captions posted under the images.

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Even though this is not a number one issue, this second (and last) issue of
TRUMP magazine is a kind of a first. Harvey and Jack teamed up to do stories
in color for the first time in a slick magazine. Later on Jack did help Harvey in
the “assembly line” process of early LITTLE ANNIE FANNY stories in PLAYBOY.

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This spoof of the movie GIANT might be one of their best satires
because of the color.

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This feature in TRUMP # 2 was titled “Sporty Illustrations”
a send up of SPORTS ILLUSTRATED magazine,
Jack did four pages of this piece.

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Here’s is the cover of HUMBUG # 1.

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Harvey’s new ventures usually include a personal “heartfelt” intro.
Since HUMBUG was self financed by himself and his crew, I thought
it would be appropriate to include these here.
The caricatures are the icing on the cake.

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Elia Kazan’s 1956 BABY DOLL gets the Harvey and Jack treatment.
Harvey has fun again with panel borders
like he did in the first MAD comic book story.

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The next four pages contain some of Jack’s finest pen work. Eye candy!

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If anyone wants to see more of HUMBUG, the recent
beautifully crafted reprint book is available on Amazon.

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During the runs of early MAD, TRUMP and HUMBUG,
Sid Ceasar was to television what Harvey Kurtzman was to comic books.
Who better to put on the first issue of HELP!

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It’s only one page but at least Harvey and Jack are still at it!

- This is the second part of the collaborative work of Harvey Kurtzman and
Jack Davis. It’s a series that Bill Peckmann graciously put together and contributed.

You can find part 1 here.

All comments under the images are Bill Peckmann’s.

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In a little under three years since the first issue the comic book MAD
made its’ debut, we now have MAD # 24, July 1955, which was the
very first issue of MAD Magazine.

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First page – Editor’s message.

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Harvey and Jack’s lead feature in the “Sports Dept.” of the
magazine is an animated tour de force.
The poses are side splitters, enjoy!

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Here is the cover of TRUMP magazine #1, Jan. 1957.
This was the first venture that Harvey had with High Hefner.
Unfortunately, TRUMP lasted only two issues. When this
Harvey and Jack spoof of a popular TV show came out, I’ll
always remember my older brother and his friends reading
this particular story with tears streaming down their faces,
it was that good!

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Many thanks to Bill for his generosity in sharing this with us.

- Bill Peckmann sent me a couple of comics that demonstrated a great collaboration between Harvey Kurtzman and Jack Davis. With that small bit of information, let me turn it over to Bill:

I thought it would be fun to give your readers some milestones in the collaborating efforts of Harvey Kurtzman and Jack Davis. It will be done in the form of showing #1 issues of certain comic book and magazine titles. I’ve always felt that the relationship of Harvey, and Jack was not that dissimilar from that of John Ford and John Wayne. All men were very successful in their own right but when they teamed up there was that extra spark in their art. Ford and Kurtzman would lay these wonderful creative foundations and then Davis and Wayne came in to add the finishing touches. For both teams, the final product always seemed so effortless and seamless.

Part 1 – FRONTLINE COMBAT (comic book) and MAD (comic book)

Part 2 – MAD (magazine) and TRUMP (magazine)

Part 3 – Humbug (magazine) and HELP ( magazine)

Here are those pages, with Bill’s comments:

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Harvey’s bio that ran in EC Comics
during the publication of the war comcs.

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Jack’s bio.

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A little over a year after FRONTLINE COMBAT came out in 1951, MAD started in 1952.

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This is the first page of the first comic book that started
an institution that is still with us almost 60 years later.

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It’s easy to forget, but up until this time, there had never been
quite a story like this in comic books.

Jesse Marsh was a comic artist who, principally, is known for his work on ‘Tarzan’, the comic series published by Dell. He was a self-taught artist who started working for the Disney studio in 1939. He worked on Fantasia and Pinocchio in the story department. He served in the Army as a radar specialist and was wounded with a mortar shell. After the War and a long recuperation, he returned to Disney but also worked freelance at Western Publishing. He left Disney in 1947 to work at Western, where he took charge of the TARZAN series of comic books.

Jesse Marsh (L) and Tom Oreb (R) in the early 1940s
borrowed from Dan Nadel, posted Monday, March 29, 2010
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Bill Peckmann sent some scans of various art by Jesse Marsh and I’m pleased to post them here. Many thanks to Bill. He writes:

“Before gaining success as DELL Comics’ TARZAN artist in the late 40′s and 50′s, Jesse Marsh, early in his career, worked for Disney in animation. The following material is some rarely published from that time period, They are taken from Charles Solomon’s 1995 book, The Disney That Never Was.”

The following is the accompanying article by Solomon about Marsh’s artwork:

In 1946, a second crew, under Jesse Marsh, returned to “Don Quixote.” This version would have been set to an adaptation of Richard Strauss’s tone poem Don Quixote: Fantastic Variations on a Theme of Knightly Character far Large Qrchestra, op. 35. Marsh prepared hundreds of neat pen-and-ink and watercolor cartoons, noting the musical themes that would accompany the action. He did enough rough storyboards for an entire film, beginning with a shot of the book resting on a table I flanked by suits of armor, and concluding with a sort of apotheosis: After Don Quixote’s death, he, Dulcinea, and Sancho Panza would ride through the clouds to a glittering castle beneath a rainbow. Like the earlier version, this incarnation of “Don Quixote” was apparently shelved before story meetings were held or dialogue prepared.
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Preproduction work began for the third time in April 1951. This crew used an even simpler style that reflects the influence of such New Yorker cartoonists as Sol Steinberg and Otto Soglow; The rounded characters consist of little more than a few ink lines with monochromatic highlights in dull green or tan. Work on the film must have ended soon after it began, as only a few dozen drawings were completed.

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One of Jesse’s early Tarzan covers, 1949

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The following is from the Disney True-Life Adventure comic book, 1957.

Jesse did not do the cover of this 1957 comic,
but he did do all of the 3 inside stories.

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This is the first of the three stories in this book.

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Combine Marsh’s “non slick” style with his beautiful panel and
page layout designs, and you got some impressive results.

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A site called The Jesse Marsh Site offers the complete Dell TARZAN no. 1, from January 1948. This was actually the third TARZAN that Dell published.

- The Whitney Museum is currently hosting a show of artwork by Lionel Feininger. To have some connection with the show, I thought it’d be a good time to post some more of the Kin-Der-Kids comic strip that he’d done in 1906. Bill Peckmann had sent more pages. I hope you enjoy this artist’s work; it was a daring comic strip for the time.

You can see my past posts on Feininger’s comic strip work at: Kin-Der-Kids, Wee Willie Winkie

The Dover book cover

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- The Gumps was the first comic strip to tell a running story. Like a serial the strip continued on a daily basis from 1917 through 1957. The story was particularly compelling; readers grew addicted to it, like a soap opera. In 1923, the Board of Trade in Minneapolis suspended operations so that the brokers could get the afternoon paper to find out whether the Gumps’ billionaire Uncle Bim had been trapped in marriage. When Mary Gold died in 1929, it was the first time a cartoon character died in a strip, and the Chicago Tribune was swamped with mail and phone calls with people threatening to cancel their subscriptions to the paper if she wasn’t brought back.

An Editor of the Chicago Tribune, Joseph Patterson, came up with the idea of having a strip that reflected the stories of “real” people. He didn’t want a daily gag with this strip and hired Sidney Smith to develop such a strip. Patterson came up with the title, “The Gumps” and brought some story ideas to Smith to develop.

It was the first strip to make its creator, Sidney Smith, a millionaire. It was that popular, and they promoted the contract. He drew the strip until his death in 1935. Smith had just signed a new three year contract and went out to celebrate. He died in a car crash.

The strip went on to a couple of assistants who worked with Smith, Stanley Link and Blair Walliser. However, for reasons hard to understand now, it was Gus Edson, a staff artist for the New York News, who continued the strip into the 50′s. (Edson was later one of the creators of the strip, Dondi, also created with an appealing, continuous story.)

The story being everything, I thought I’d introduce the strip here with a number of panels to give you a taste, and then I’ll follow with more chunks of the story. Believe me it’s a compelling story, well told, and even the drawing style becomes pleasant as you get into it. So here are the first strips.

{Click any image to enlarge to be able to read it.)

Comic strips were more of an art form back then, when The Gumps was enormously popular. First off, they were large enough to be able to read them. Because there was no television and newspapers were vitally important to people’s lives, comic strips took on another role that has been eliminated today.

Comics had a large enough popularity that they were able to grab a regular and large readership. This allowed them to be daring enough to try to grab a larger audience through whatever means necessary.

The Gumps was clever in many ways and provided the goods with an exceptional story line that had a very large audience.

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- Another coup sent my way by Bill Peckmann. Here we have a stash of early comic covers from the brilliant artist, Harvey Kurtzman. So sit back and enjoy the trip as you scroll down. Many thanks to Bill for sharing his never-ending archives. Here’s what Mr. Peckmann has to say about the covers (all comments beneath the Covers are also his):

Forward Harch! With the last half of Harvey Kurtzman’s covers. Again they are in the order they were published. There willll be a segue between the war titles and MAD to give your readers a sense of where Harvey was coming from when he started MAD comics. It’s amazing how the wonderful coloring of the covers just holds up so well after all these years! The first TWO-FISTED TALES cover is so visceral in a non action way, you can just feel the bone numbing cold of those minus degrees in North Korea.

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Harvey’s last TWO-FISTED cover.

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His first MAD cover, # 1.

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His last FRONTLINE cover. After this, his crew of Jack Davis,
Severin & Elder and Wally Wood took over cover duties.

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You had to live in NYC to really appreciate this cover,
it’s a perfect spoof of the then NEW YORK DAILY NEWS,
lay out, right down to the type faces, everything!

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A cute, clever idea, but as a kid, I felt we were being ripped off,
we wanted a full blown HK cover!

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Even EC Comics got swept up in the 3-D fad,
they did 2 books, how they got Harvey to this cover
I’ll never know, maybe because there’s one MAD story in it.