Michael Sporn Animation – Splog

- The other shoe drops. A while back I posted the first half of the comic book, Clint & Mac, which was illustrated by Alex Toth from a Disney live-action feature. The book was sent to me by Bill Peckmann, and we’ve just put together the second half, for your amusement. The art’s all first rate, and the story adaptation isn’t that bad either.

Here’s a note Bill sent me with the scans:

This book has been a real pleasant discovery and surprise. I’ve got to confess because of its innocuous title, it’s always been on the bottom of my pile and until recently hasn’t got the kudos it deserves. I know for me it was seeing the recent publication of Manuel Auad‘s very fine Robert Fawcett: The Illustrator’s Illustrator that made me realize just how much of a Fawcett fan Alex was and it really shows in his “Clint & Mac”.

Here’s the rest of the story, starting where we left off with pag. 19:

The magazine’s cover

19

20

21

22

23

24

25

26

27

28

29

30

31

32

33

34

35
Inside Back Cover

36
Back Cover

Here’s an additional treat: it’s the original art of the “All American Western” cover, #107, 1949. Dean Mullaney had printed this art in the book Genius Isolated which he co-authored with Bruce Canwell. They were kind enough to send it to Bill for posting here.

The original art

Here’s the color cover as it appears in the Magazine.

Many thanks to Bill Peckmann for arranging and passing along this rare bit of comic art.

- Bill Peckmann forwarded the following material from Mad magazine taken from the collected Mad For Keeps. Here’s to Bill’s comments:

Here’s a little something for all Harvey Kurtzman (writing and unseen rough lay outs) and Jack Davis (finished art) fans.

In 1958, Crown Publishers came out with the best of MAD collection. I believe this is the first hardcover collection of EC Comics to ever come out. Most of the book is comprised of MAD Magazine (started in ’55) stories and a few MAD Comic Book (’52 to ’55) stories.
Some of the comic book stories are printed in their original color, others without their original color. As far as I can tell, all of the work in here was written/rough laid out/edited by Harvey Kurtzman, MAD’s founder. It’s all copyrighted by EC Comics.

By the time the book came out it must have been a very bittersweet moment for Harvey because he had already left MAD, and MAD was just starting to become a commercial success. MAD went on to become an industry, rightfully so, but IMHO it never again was the “class” act that Harvey shepherded in. Also in retrospect, Kurtzman couldn’t have sustained that level for ever. After all, how many “Starry Nights” could Vincent paint?

1
We’ll start off with the cover, comprised from one of the issues,
which has Harvey’s great MAD logo, Bill Elder’s border and probably
Norman Mingo’s first Alfred E. Neuman illustration.

2
This is the back cover which Jack Davis embellished.

3
Here’s the book’s introduction by Ernie Kovacs.

4
I thought with this book we would be able to show Jack Davis’ neat
transition from “comic book” art to “magazine illustration” art.
Again, during this time period, Jack is working over Harvey’s rough layouts.
Man, what a team! Sans coloring, you can really see Harvey’s storytelling and Jack’s beautiful brush & pen line work and his masterful spotting of “blacks”.

So here is the whole comic book story.

5

6

7

8

9

10

11

12
On to the “magazine” part. Look how sweetly Harvey laid this out,
add Jack’s hilarious art and you have perfection. Harvey always
compared Jack’s art to best strawberry ice cream sundae; I’ve
always seen it as the best sparkling jewelry ever, either way,
what eye candy!

ps: It doesn’t seem like baseball’s changed that much in 55 years.

13

14

15

16

17
We’ll end on one of the early advertising spoofs and you can see
Jack is well on his way to becoming one of our national treasures.

- In 1980 Portfolio Magazine gave us this article about Edward Hopper. Bill Peckmann sent it to me, and I thought it interesting to post here, especially in that today is Memorial Day, and what better day to celebrate America.

So, I hope you enjoy it.

(Click any image to enlarge.)

The magazine’s cover

2

3

4

5

6

7

8

- You’ll remember that last week I posted a bit of Arnold Roth‘s brilliant book, A Comick Book of Pets.

Arnold Roth was born in 1929 in Philadelphia, Pa. He attended public schools and was awarded a scholarship to art school. He started free lancing in 1951 and continues to do so. Mr. Roth has had cartoons published in The New Yorker, Time Magazine, Sports Illustrated, Playboy, Punch and the NY Times. He’s worked briefly in animation for John Hubley and Phil Kimmelman. He currently lives in Manhattan with his wife and two sons.

Blessed Bill Peckmann has been feeding me some great scans of this book, and I’m ecstatic to be able to post them. This week, with the second part of the posting, we go out to all cat lovers (that includes me, I must say), and we present the chapter on “Cats”. The material’s pretty funny, and the drawings couldn’t be finer. I hope you enjoy.

1

2

3

4

5

6

7

8

9

10

11

And as an additional bonus,
Bill Peckmann had this original ad which
Arnold Roth did for Phil Kimmelman & Ass.

- Bill Peckmann sent me this in case I hadn’t already posted it. In fact, I’ve never seen it before so it’s a bit of a treasure to me, a big fan of UPA. Here’s Bill’s note:

This is a studio brochure/mailer* reprinted from American Artist Magazine Nov. 1955. I remember reading the article in high school, it had a huge impact. I remembered it for many years after because of the scarcity of animation articles at that time. And, because it appeared in an “art” magazine, it seemed to make “cartooning” legit.
Did Disney art ever appear in an “art” magazine around this time?

*This brochure was given to me by Ruth Mane (UPA Alumni) many, years ago.

And now, Bill’s passed it onto us. Many thanks, Bill.

1
(Click any image to enlarge.)

2

3

4

5

6

7

8

There’s no doubt this article followed up on the Museum of Modern Art‘s 1955 show of UPA art. Amid Amidi posted an extraordinary piece about this show on his Cartoon Modern site. By the way, this is an exquisite site. It’s just a shame that Amid let it lay after his promotion for his book Cartoon Modern. Take some time and browse around that site when you have some time.

A snap of one of the walls at the 1955 MoMA UPA Exhibit.
(from Amid Amidi’s site, Cartoon Modern.)

- Bill Peckmann sent some fresh Alex Toth material and with it came some notes. So, I’ll turn the blog over to him today:

In keeping with the celebration of Dean Mullaney‘s book, Genius Isolated, I thought I’d scan some of Alex’s early 1950′s and early 1960′s comic book art.

The first three are DC Comics’ “All American Western” covers from 1949 to 1951. (Wonderful house/publisher coloring.) The character he was doing for the book was called “Johnny Thunder”, a western hero with a Clark Kent duel personality. Alex was only 21 years old at the time of the first cover.

(#121 has been reprinted in “Genius”)

1

2

3

The following is the back cover of issue #121, it’s an ad, non Toth, I just thought you’d get a kick out of it. . . .

. . . As an 8 year old I remember this premium/give away very well, Donald and Mickey were the prized ones of course. To all us little cookie snappers at that time, anything Disney was few and far between, unlike today!

The following complete story is from EC Comics’ “Two-Fisted Tales”, issue #22, 1951. (This scan is of the cover done by book editor Harvey Kurtzman.)

The story “Dying City” was written, layed out and outstandingly inked by Harvey Kurtzman. The beautiful tight pencils were Alex’s. Both gents were in their best Milton Caniff mode, wonderful job of a very grim story.

1

2

3

4

5

6

7

8

In 1963 Alex was doing “Mad Magazine” type pages for “cartoon car” type magazines coming out of the west coast. It looks like he had an easy time slipping into the skins of Jack Davis and Mort Drucker and seemed to enjoy doing it for a while. These 2 stories are from “DRAG CARtoons” #2. They are take offs of the then popular TV series, “Dr. Kildare” and “The Defenders.

1

2

3

4

5

6

7

8

Both these stories plus all of the rest of this type that Alex did for the “cartoon car” magazines were lovingly and handsomely collected by Manuel Auad (publisher of the new, excellent Robert Fawcett book) in his/this Alex Toth, One for the Road, published in 2000.

Cover – “One for the Road”

Many thanks to Bill Peckmann for all the great material in this post.

- Leif Peng on his site, Today’s Inspiration, has been posting art of Rowland B. Wilson all this past week. Bill Peckmann has suggested we post a complementary piece today to work with Leif’s site. Consequently, here are a number of pieces. As we go through each, I’ll give you Bill to tell you in his own words what’s coming.

I’m starting off with a CARTOONIST’S PROFILE of RBW. You’ve posted some of the art in color already, but it’s nice to see how it breaks down in B & W.
Rowland was always totally aware of how his color art would translate into the gray scale.

The cover of Cartoonist Profiles.

1

2

3

4

5

6

7

The next two gags were taken from a reprint book titled “Esquire’s World of Humor”, 1964(?). Fortunately they hadn’t been reprinted in the Whites of Their Eyes, so they are somewhat “new”. Sadly, they were reprinted in B & W, the color art must have been beautiful.

1

2

Here are examples of how Rowland figured out the shading of his full color TV GUIDE illustrations. He would take a Xeroxed line drawing and then “fool” with it with colored pencils.

1

2

3

The next 3 pieces are roughs for PLAYBOY gags. Even his roughs look “finished”. Suzanne Wilson was kind enough to send me these.

1

2

3

Here are some photos from June, 1973 when Rowland started working at Richard William’s studio in London. Fortunately for Rowland, that was just the time that Grim Natwick was teaching over there and as they say… that was the start of a beautiful friendship!

1
One Soho Square

Rowland at his desk

2
Animator, Jeff Short with Rowland.

3
Rowland with Grim Natwick

4
Bill Peckmann with Grim Natwick outside Dick’s studio

5
Rowland with Grim

6
Rowland with Suzanne

Finally, here’s a note from Suzanne Wilson about the Rowland B. Wilson book which is currently in the works:

A compendium (?) of Rowland’s personal notes, techniques, sketches, etc. is in the works. It is largely based on Rowland’s collected “how-to” pages that he developed in order to create a system that could be applied to illustration, animation, cartooning and graphic novels.

The publisher is Focal Press. I don’t expect it will come out until 2012…

They haven’t said I can’t announce the book, but the title is not finalized (plus I am having conniptions about ever completing it on time…

I happened to scroll down on Michael’s website and see Laurel and Hardy. I didn’t know if you knew Rowland painted them on the cabinet doors of a workbench he built…

The workbench

Oliver

Stan

- Here’s a precious item scanned and sent to me by Bill Peckmann. It’s a song book that Tomi Ungerer illustrated. Back in the 70s, Ungerer‘s work was everywhere. As a matter of fact, I always seemed to take it for granted. Yet, everytime I came upon one of his brilliant children’s books, I would find him anew. Always the work was excellent with a depth that you rarely found except in the best of Sendak or Glaser.

This song book, published in 1975, is filled with fine illustrations by Mr. Ungerer. This is a style whose depths he plumbed in ths period with books like Strega Nonna or The Three Robbers. Unlike much of his earliest work, it seemed less cartoon and more Bruegel.

The book’s cover

The Title Page

1

2

3

4

5

6

7

8

9

10

11

12

13

14

Many thanks to Bill Peckmann for contributing this artwork, scans and inspiration.

- The following piece was sent to me by Bill Peckmann. Here’s his introduction to it:

Here’s something that might not be accessible to some of your readers.
It’s the program booklet of the 1972 EC Comics Convention that was held in NYC.

I’ve scanned the pages pertaining to cartoonists of the early MAD comic book. The caricatures were done in the early ’50′s (EC at it’s peak) by a very young Marie Severin. (EC colorist then, went on to fame at MARVEL comics later.). The comments of the cartoonists are made by their compatriots for the Convention. Twenty years had passed but the good memories were still there.

So here we have editor/artist Harvey Kurtzman. Artists – Jack Davis, Bill Elder, Wally Wood, John Severin, colorist Marie Severin (sister of John) and last but not least, publisher of EC Comics, Bill Gaines.

1

2

3

4

5

6

7

8

9

10

11

12

13

14

15

16

Many thanks to Bill Peckmann for sharing the material,

- In celebration of the new book about Alex Toth, Genius Isolated by Dean Mullaney and Bruce Canwell, we’re posting some Toth work for Dell comics in the 60s.

Bill Peckman has an enormous collection of comics by Toth, and with the help of Dean Mullaney, we’d like to show how beautiful Alex Toth’s originals look in comparison with the poor quality printing of the comics. You can see how degraded the lines become in the final magazines when placing them alongside the original art.

Here are three comparisons to make from the comic, The Land Unknown.

This is the published cover.

1a
Look at the soft lines printed on the poor quality newsprint.

1b
This is the original from Alex Toth.

2a

2b

3a

3b

Here are a sampling of other magazines done by Alex Toth.

4

5

6

7

8

9

10

11

12

13

14

Alex Toth also did a lot of TV titles such as: 77 Sunset Strip, Sugerfoot, The Real McCoys’, Danny Thomas, The Lennon Sisters… to name a few.

Probably his best remembered title is Zorro from the Disney TV series. This was reprinted not too long ago – the first collaboration between Alex Toth and Dean Mullaney.