Michael Sporn Animation – Splog

- 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.

- 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.

- Bill Peckmann sent me the following article about Jack Davis from Fanfare Magazine of Summer 1983. The article chronicles the record cover art of Jack Davis up to that year. As Bill wrote me, the B&W illustrations have a lot to be desired, however the material is so valuable that I’ve chosen to post it just the same. We have what we can get. There’s a lot of information in the writing, and the images are not ideal but certainly liveable; after all, it is Jack Davis. I hope you agree.

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Front cover

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Back of wrap-around cover

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Many thanks to Bill Peckmann for scanning and sending and sharing.

- This past week, Yowp, the excellent site devoted to Hanna-Barbera’s early product, offered a fine piece on Arnold Stang. After reading it, I thought it worth telling about my one contact with Mr. Stang.

I was about to do my first half-hour show for HBO. It was a musical version of the Bernard Waber children’s book, LYLE LYLE CROCODILE. Charles Strouse had written some fine songs, and I cast them with auditions. The two people who made it through without auditions were: Charles Strouse, himself, in the bit singing role as a moving man. He had a small part of the chorus in the opening song. _____________Arnold and Charles’ characters sing together.
Arnold Stang was cast as a bird
owned by the family. I couldn’t help myself; I had to bring in the guy who was a key part of 50 & 60s animation history – at least for my own amusement.

Arnold had to squawk a number of times, speak a few scratchy lines, and sing a couple of lines in the opening song as he, the bird, is moved into the House on East 88th Street. When we recorded Arnold singing, it was to a temp track of the music. The engineer, Strouse and I sat in the control booth with Arnold in the large recording booth.

He sang the lines. I was excited and pleased and felt he’d gotten it on the first take.

Charles Strouse said otherwise and asked for them to be redone.

The same results; I knew they were great, Charles was annoyed about them, and he made the mistake of going over me, the director, to punching the button to talk to Arnold in the booth. The two of them got into a shouting match over the ridiculous. Charles wanted Arnold to sound more like a bird. Arnold kept pointing out that he wasn’t a bird and such birds don’t talk, never mind sing. He also pointed out that he played a cat and dog and many other types of animals, but he was always a human, not an animal.

With every jab, Charles Strouse came back with another. The two of them were screaming, and I finally had to stop it. I took the button from Charles’ hand and asked Arnold to excuse us while we discussed it in the control room. From that point on, Arnold couldn’t hear us as I told Charles that he was being ridiculous and Arnold had been doing a good job. He backed off (hopefully realizing what a jerk he’d become.) However, now Charles had gotten the talent upset and he was supposed to perform under such stressful conditions. It was very unprofessional of Charles, and equally so that he thought he could take charge of the recording session. I was the director and would make all decisions from then on, and only I was allowed to speak to the performer, Arnold.

Charles yielded. What else could he do. I asked Arnold if he could step back to the beginning and try to smooth his feathers and do it one more time for me. He agreed, did a great job, and I thanked him for his help.

In fact, it did turn out great. Arnold brought a nice and funny character to the bird. Which was a minor part and not worth an argument.

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Years later, for a special Birthday I had coming up, Heidi wanted to throw a surprise party. She invited Arnold, and he left a wonderful message on her machine thanking her but not able to attend. She still has that recording and it’s pretty cute. Arnold speaking in his natural voice sounding so positive and lovely.

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- J.J. Sedelmaier has started a new column for Imprint Magazine. Imprint is, basically, the blog for Print Magazine. You’ll remember that John Canemaker had a year’s worth of excellent and diverse columns there, and Steven Heller continues to write some very smart pieces. Just look at the announcement about Pablo Ferro which leads to this great, recent bio of the designer.

But, back to J.J. Sedelmaier’s piece on Gary Baseman. It’s a wonderfully illustrated piece with lots of artwork from Mr. Baseman. A wonderful illustrator, he has been working for years in animation thanks to both R.O.Blechman and J.J.’s studios. He also did a fine series for Disney with “Teacher’s Pet.”

J.J. shows how they achieved his painterly style, in a commercial his studio produced, using the cels. It’s a good article and something to look forward to monthly.

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- Illostribute is a blog devoted to the art of Illustration. They currently have a tribute to Mary Blair, which seems to have pulled many of her gorgeous illustrations from the Canemaker book, The Art and Flair of Mary Blair. (This book is a beauty and should be owned by everyone in animation.)

It’s a curious site in that they seem to post illustrations inspired by the featured artist; this they do on the Mary Blair feature. There are several older posts I found interesting. It was nice, for example, to see some paintings by Jack Levine and be reminded of his great work.

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- Bill Peckman continues to delight with some of the brilliant artwork he scans for my site. It’s a pleasure to post it and study it. Here, we have the comic book version of The John Ford/John Wayne film, “Wings of Eagles.” Here’s what Bill wrote:

Alex Toth‘s passion for aviation was only second to his love for art, so he must have welcomed and relished this assignment when it came in from Dell/Western Publishing. It was the comic book adaptation of the biopic movie “Wings Of Eagles” (1957). It also didn’t hurt that Alex was a big fan of the movie’s director, John Ford. Here’s hoping that the backlit computer screen will offset some of the printing press problems of those days of yore (It Does!) and make the pages look closer to what Toth had envisioned. The originals would have been an eyeful to see! Go to the Bruce Canwell and Dean Mullaney book, “Alex Toth, Genius Isolated” to see what Alex’s original Dell art work looked like before quite a bit of it was lost in the primitive pulp printing process.

So here without further ado, is John Ford, John Wayne and Alex Toth’s “Wings Of Eagles”!

The Front Cover

Inner Front Cover

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One of the best pages in the book, too bad the colorist
miscolored the big double panel. The bg. color should have
been the deep blue sea, not the light blue sky.

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