Michael Sporn Animation – Splog

I’ve received a number of emails of collections of Christmas cards done by various artists. These are usually entertaining. However, I’ve found a number of my cards among quite a few of these groups, and I find that a bit awkward. I never quite sent them expecting they’d be published in any way, but I’m certainly going to roll with the punches. I’m not sure everything I post is designed to be published, either.

I did publish pages of a book which had posted one of my cards, and I did have some qualms about reposting those pages. Since one of them was mine, I figured that relieved any guilt I was feeling. So much art just wouldn’t be seen if it weren’t put on blogs like mine, so I justify it.

The image above came from an animated card I didn’t finish. It was a little dance Santa does as he eats an ice cream pop. It ends with a burst of snow spelling out the “Merry Christmas” message. I spent about . . . I don’t know. I spent a lot of time animating and coloring , and I still had about 15 seconds of art to finish it. But I missed the deadline. I would have had to kill myself and still probably miss getting it out ON Christmas Day. Absurd.

The real problem was that I hated the work that I’d done. It wasn’t something I was really proud of. There were too many distractions and I loved doing it on a day to day basis, but I’d forgotten to watch the big picture. Put it all together, and it didn’t need to go public. So, I apologize. No Christmas Card this year.

To all those that haven’t received anything from me, which means anyone reading this Splog, please accept my apologies and please, Have yourself a Merry and Big Christmas.

- From Bill Peckman:

Here are some Holiday and Christmas cheer cards from over the years, done by some of our favorite pen and brush men.

First through the mail slot is Jack Davis.

1
(Click any image to enlarge.)

2

3

The following are Harvey Kurtzman‘s cards:

4
5
6

7

8

9

10

11

12

And now from the gifted hand of Arnold Roth.

13

14

15

16

17

18

19

20

21

22

A terrific threesome from Wally Tripp!

23

24

25

Thanks to Suzanne Wilson for these Christmas chuckles from Rowland Wilson.

26

27

28

29

30

31

32

- A new book has been released, Albert Dorne, Master Illustrator. This is a book to fill a necessary hole. The brilliant work of Mr. Dorne must be recognized, and this edition gives him that spotlight he well deserves. With the mere viewing of any of these pieces I am immediately made to think of the Famous Artists School of home education. Mr. Dorne created that school and system and certainly affected a generation of artists.

The book’s cover

Bill Peckmann, of course, brought it to my attention, and wrote the following to introduce this post:

This is more of a heartfelt plug than an in depth review, but the book is hot off of the presses, it’s great, and just in case anybody wants to get them selves a well deserved stocking stuffer for the Season, this is it!

You know the new Albert Dorne, Master Illustrator book is going to be good because of a number of reasons. Number one, if you are a Jack Davis fan, did you ever wonder who Jack is a fan of? It’s something he always played very close to the vest, but now we know, It’s Al Dorne!
The second reason, is that the book comes to us by the same team that brought us that excellent book, Robert Fawcett, the Illustrator’s Illustrator, Messieurs Manuel Auad and David Apatoff!
The third reason the book is terrific, is because, it is about Al Dorne, illustrator extraordinaire, who was also the founder of the Famous Artist School! The ups and downs of his incredible life, a very huge selection of his work, it’s all here!

It’s said, that if you want to grab anybody’s attention,
you’ve got to start off with a potent bang. What better way
than with the master big bangster, prankster himself,
the one and only Jack B. Davis!

3

4

5

6

7

8

9

10

11

12

13

14

15
This 1955 Jack Davis comic book cover is not from the Al Dorne book, but
I included it here to illustrate the fact that Al and Jack were marching to the
same drummer. Also, both men were absolutely fearless in taking on crowd scenes!

16

17

18

20

21

22
Bill writes: Sorry, I couldn’t help myself. I had to throw in
another Jack Davis comparison to illustrate how both
Mr Dorne and Mr. Davis could handle and control drawing
crowd chaos like nobody’s business!

23

24

25

26

27

- We gave a little tease of this last week. Straight from the hot scanner of Bill Peckmann comes “Humbug” for Christmas joy. Here’s Bill:

Next in our Holiday helpings is a 1958 HUMBUG magazine’s ‘Christmas Issue’ by Harvey Kurtzman and his coconspirators. Fortunately for us, they are knee deep in shoveling out their unique form of tom foolery for everyone to enjoy in 2012!

1
The cover was done by Jack Davis.

2
This page was done by Bill Elder.

3
These two pages are obviously by the inimitable Bob Blechman.

4

5
A piece by Al Jaffee, who went on to become
one of Mad magazine’s favorites.

6

7

8
This three page spread does not have
a Christmas theme but it does have
Harvey’s ever lovin’ lay outs with
Jack Davis at his brush and pen best!

9
10

A tour de force two color centerfold spread by Al Jaffe.

A double page spread by Arnold Roth.

13
‘A Christmas Carol’, art by Arnold Roth.

14

15

16

17

18

While in a holiday mode, we will segue from a 1958 Humbug ‘Christmas Carol’ party
to a birthday party. It’s Harvey Kurtzman’s 58th birthday which was celebrated at
Harvey’s house in Mt. Vernon, NY, with family and friends in 1982. (Sorry about
the quality of the snapshots, they were taken with an old Kodak Instamatic camera.)

1
Appearing in the photo L. to R. are Al Jaffee, Harvey Kurtzman, Bill Elder (kneeling),
Harry Chester (Harvey’s long time production manager and longer time friend),
Arnold Roth and a partially hidden and mischievous Jack Davis.

2
The HUMBUG crew with their wives.

3
Mr. and Mrs. Will Eisner and Harvey.

4
Dena and Jack Davis.

5
Harvey and his wife Adelle with daughters, Elizabeth, Nellie and Meredith.

.

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

.

- There are times when I wish I had a political blog so that I could vent some of the political venom that builds up in my little world.

Fortunately, my first love is animation, and I maintain steadfastly an animation and cartooning blog. And believe me, one blog’s enough.

Given that, I’m proud to present this post.

- We’ve already met Fritz Baumgarten‘s characters Teddy and we’ve seen his version of Santa. In this sweet little book, Teddy gets to meet Santa. It’s another wonderful Christmas book done in the very round style of Mr. Baumgarten. That coupled with his delicate and limited color palette.
Teddy’s Weihnachten.

This book comes from Bill Peckmann. Many thanks to him. His one short comment is:

Here is our second German Christmas card (book) from Fritz Baumgarten. (Man, can he do birds, or what!)

I hope you enjoy it.

Book’s cover

2

3

4

5

6
You’ve got to love this picture !

7

8

9

1

11

12

13

14

15

16

17
Beautiful poses on those birds.

18

19

20

21

22

23

24

25

The End

.
And a last note comment with an additional page from Bill Peckmann:
“In keeping with the Spirits (hic!) of Christmas past, a peek of a future post…”

Having begun last week with an exceptional post, courtesy of Bill Peckmann, on Bernard Krigstein, we can only try to do another one. We certainly can’t top any of his artwork.
(Go here to read that past post.)

So here, again thanks to Mr. Peckmann, more great art. Bill takes over the writing from here on out.

With his ground breaking, graphic, illustrative comic book pages, Bernard Krigstein did some of the best EC Comics art ever.
1
He excelled in their genre of crime comics…

2
…their line of horror comics…

3
…and their science-fiction titles.

But Bernie also did two stories for Harvey Kurtzman’s MAD comic book and a few illustrations for Harvey’s early MAD magazine. Here is all of Krigstein’s art work for MAD.

1
Starting with MAD #12, June 1954, is Kurtzman’s and Krigstein’s 7 page
movie spoof titled “From Eternity Back to Here”.

2

3

4

5

6

7

8

9
Here from MAD comic book #17, Nov. 1954,
is “Bringing Back Father”, a comic strip send up
done by using the talents of Harvey Kurtzman,
Bill Elder and Bernard Krigstein!

10

11

12

13

14

15

16

17

For the first issue of Kurtzman’s MAD magazine, # 24, July 1955,
Krigstein did two illustrations to accompany a story done with text.

18

19

20

Here from MAD magazine # 26, Nov. 1955, are a few story illustrations by Krigstein.
It would be the last time that he and Harvey Kurtzman collaborated.

21

22

Postnote from Bill:
For those readers who are coming upon Bernie Krigstein for the first time and like him, there are still two very worthy books available on him through Amazon. Both are authored by Greg Sadowski, Vol. 1 is a bio, it’s an excellent bio, especially his early life, with many illo’s, both are out of print but not cost prohibitive.
Take a look, here.

In 1973 Raymond Briggs did this eccentric telling of Father Christmas, treating him as you would a real person. The book is funny, and John Coates followed up his adaptation of Briggs’ Snowman book into animation by doing this book as a video. It was almost as successful as The Snowman, though not quite. It relied on a different form of humor.

The film, Father Christmas, was released in 1997 and was nicely directed by Dave Unwin with a tour de force performance by Mel Smith as Father Christmas. However, watch out for later versions that use William Dennis Hunt as the VO character, they’ve taken all the purposeful darkness out of the character and have sanitized it to within an inch of its life.

However, the original Raymond Briggs book still exists, and that’s what Bill Peckmann has forwarded onto me, and I present it happily.

1

2

3

4

5

6

7

8

9

11

12

16

17

20

21

22

23

24

As a follow-up here’s a piece Bill found about Raymond Briggs:

1

2
(Click any image to enlarge.)

3
Ernest Briggs on his milk float.

4

- Back in the days when animation books were a rarity and actual lessons in books were few and far between, there were Heath Books and equipment. This was a company, if I can remember correctly, which was situated in Florida. They had several books for sale, the most well known was “Animation In Twelve Hard Lessons”. It was spiral bound book and over-sized like the Preston Blair book, it contained detailed instruction on the mechanics of animation.

Bob Heath, I believe, was a former cameraman in animation, and his partner in writing was Tony Creazzo, a former Assistant Animator. If I remember correctly, he was closely aligned with Vinnie Bell in New York. The two were always connected; if you wanted Vinnie to animate, you also hired Tony to assist.

Well, not only did Bob Heath sell How-to books on animation, but he also sold equipment. Paper, pencils, hole punches, even an Oxberry Jr. camera stand could be bought from the company. They had an original design of a light box for sale. Lots of things that could help you set up in the animation business if you had no idea who “Cartoon Colour” was.

I’ve decidded to post this relic of a book, Here in the first chapter is Bob Heath’s “How to Animate in 12 Hard Lessons.”

Front Cover

1
Chapter Index

2

3

4

5

6

7

8

9

10

11

12

13

14

15

16

17

18

19

20

Back Cover

- Recently, on this Splog, we saw Dick Moores, who would eventually replace Frank King as the artist behind Gasoline Alley, as the artist behind the beautiful comic books featuring Mickey Mouse. Bill Peckmann continues with the Disney artist, Moores, as he gives us Lambert the Sheepish Lion, Bill Peet’s tale.

But first we saw an early strip drawn by Moores, “Jim Hardy”. Bill Peckmann is here to present some of the Moores history:

When Dick Moores was assisting Chester Gould on his ‘Dick Tracy’ strip in the 1930′s, his big dream was to eventually have a daily strip of his own. In 1936, he was finally able to fulfill that wish with the comic strip ‘Jim Hardy’. It lasted from 1936 to 1942. He left ‘Jim’ to join the ranks of the Disney comic strip dept. in ’42.

In this 1977 Hyperion Press’ book of reprints we get to read Dick’s version of how the strip came about (and what a sweet read it is) and also included are the first 21 dailies of the strip.

The cover page of this Hyperion Press collection of strips.

The back cover of the book.

1

2

3

4

5

6

7

8

9

10

11

12

13

14

15
Thanks to Germund Von Wowern we have an original ‘Jim Hardy’ strip from the early 1940′s. Beautiful ink work! (Sorry about the rubber cement stains in the word balloons, those are left over from re lettered foreign language versions of the strip.)

16A
Here, I’ve broken the original strip into two parts
so that we can see it fully enlarged.

16B

_________________________

In this 1953 story Dick Moores had a great time adapting the Disney short ‘Lambert, the Sheepish Lion’ to the pages of a comic book. The more I look at the art, the more I start to get the feeling, that in Dick, the cartoonist, there was always an illustrator trying to get out. Some of these panels would have made pretty good page illustrations. (Which makes one wonder and dream of what a comic book page would have looked like if it had been done by the one and only Bill Peet!?!)

The comic book cover which contained Lambert.

The back cover

1

2

3

4

5

6

7

8

9

10

11

12

13

34

In Part 2 we’ll continue celebrating the art of Dick Moores and the release of Library of American Comics’ “Dick Moores’ Gasoline Alley”!

- Tom Hachtman, who you may remember is the friend who does Gertrude’s Follies and sometimes contributes to this Splog, (see this post about that) and his wife, Joey Hachtman, who you’ll remember has a business painting murals on the big houses at the Jersey Shore. (See this post as an example.) That’s where they live, in a house at the Jersey Shore. Point Pleasant is just a little bit of paradise with one of the rowdiest boardwalks at the shore. It’s a fun place, at least when the weather’s warm enough.

Well, Tom took some pictures. Sandy visited the shore a few weeks back, and things have been a bit different. They still don’t have heat or electric. So here’s the first of some photos of their back yard.

1
Some of the boardwalk on Atlantic Avenue.

2
A bench from the boardwalk.

3
Boardwalk booth.

4
Copters all day long.

5
Our house with the peak – looking west on Forman Avenue.

6
Our street, after Sandy, looking West.

7
White fence shows high water mark.

8
No parking today.
A parking pay station.

9
Northern NJ clean-up crew – did the basement.

10
Seton Hall’s Sigma Pi boys – cleaned out the garage.
(They found a possum playing dead convincingly.)

11
Soggy collectibles.

12
Myrna and Joey on the porch.

13
No mini-golf today

14
Kitty and Olive stop by visiting Joey (right)

15
Debris in Rick’s driveway.

16
Our house after some housecleaning.

17
Across the street – high water mark on white fence.

And of course, turning to stored artwork that the family did over the many years, things weren’t so good.

18
Here’s Tom going through some of the debris
to find anything that can be saved.

19
Here are some of the comics that Joey had done cartoons for.
It’s doubtful that the issues can be replaced.

20
More of those comics. Do you hold onto them?

21
Here are some of the many cartoons she did for Screw Magazine.
Gone.

22
A cover for New York Magazine
that Tom had saved.
It was done by Bob Grossman a few years ago.

- Suzanne Lemieux Wilson, wife of the late Rowland B. Wilson, just sent me a guide to how she, with information from Rowland, put together their invaluable book of notes called Trade Secrets. Seeing the skeleton come together for this book is quite an informative document, and I couldn’t be happier that she trusted my blog to relay the information..

Some of these illustrations and pictures have passed across this blog before, but they take on a very new meaning here, so I’m glad to post them anew. I have to thank Suzanne for the gift of this post especially given some of the hard work I know it took to scan and send documents that are large enough to work here.

By the way, if you don’t have this book, you should. The book offers an enormous amount of information about his design for animation as well as for the printed cartoon and illustration trade. How ofen does a genius of his craft offer such a guide to the “trade secrets”? Trade Secrets is an invaluable book.

May I suggest that you click any image as you go through to enlarge them and get a better look at the illustrations and the type. It’s great stuff.

1

2

3
New England Life

4
The insurance campaign ran for eighteen years–

5
Rowland also drew cartoons for the New Yorker, Esquire,
The Saturday Evening Post, Playboy and others.

6
As well as illustration and advertising.

7
Rowland’s first and last jobs were in Animation, with many
interspersed throughout his career.

8
Rowland devised illustrated instruction pages as quick reference
guides for the Layout, Background and Animation staff when he worked
at Don Bluth and Walt Disney Studios.

9
He worked on the Captain Pistol series of cartoon novels
from the 1970′s onward.
Captain Jack Pistol was a Retired Pirate and Rich Man who met with a
series of misadventures as he moved through various literary genres,
from swashbuckler to romantic comedy to spy thriller
to Western to science fiction.
Rowland sculpted three-dimensional models of the characters.

Rowland endeavored to apply the principles of drawing to life.

He created an artful environment to work and live in–

He designed and constructed a sunflower gate for the garden.

He painted the signs of the Zodiac around the base of a vaulted
ceiling…

He built a workbench for his woodworking projects and decorated it . . .

15
. . . with caricatures of Laurel and Hardy.

Because he worked in a variety of disciplines, Rowland sought
solutions that would apply to all of them and save him from “solving
the same problem over and over again”.

He consolidated the information into charts and hung them in his studio,
whether it was in Connecticut, New York, Ireland or California.

Rowland documented many techniques and observations.

The writings and illustrations filled dozens of
notebooks, binders and sketchbooks.

Much of it was xeroxed and consolidated into two giant binders as
resources for the book entitled Rowland B. Wilson’s Trade Secrets.

But the genesis for all of the notebooks and for Rowland’s oeuvre
were three flow charts that outlined procedures
that could be applied to any project.

22
The Introduction of Rowland B. Wilson’s Trade Secrets describes the
Flow Charts in general. Then each chapter is based on an aspect
contained in them. The logo at the top right shows what aspect is
covered in the chapter.

23
Chapter 8, the Process, follows a project from idea to finish
as it progresses along the Flow Charts.

Chapter 9 presents many of the charts and posters
that actually hung on the studio walls.

25
Chapter 11 shows a gallery of artwork throughout Rowland’s career,
including well-known images and some of his personal art,
never before published.

26
A page of observations on comics, graphic novels, stage and film:

27
One of three pages illustrating Styles of Notan:

28
A page showing notes on various aspects of Line:

29
A page depicting various types of Tonal Treatments:

30
Demonstration of watercolor techniques:

31
The cover image is a composite of 6 Value Studies showing the
dominance of Tone over Color:

We hope you enjoy Rowland B. Wilson’s Trade Secrets and find
inspiration within.

With Special Thanks to Bill Peckmann for photograph of
Rowland B. Wilson in his studio.

_______________________

And as a bonus to this post, here are some drawings RBW did on a napkin at a lunch with Dick Williams.
Suzanne wrote:

I discovered some vintage Rowland B. Wilson “doodles”, sketched on
napkins at Mario’s Restaurant in Westport, Connecticut–thought you
might enjoy them. The caricature of Suzanne and Rowland (image 2)
looks to me like the RBW take on Richard Williams’ drawing of us (image 3).

1
Mario

2
Suzanne and Rowland caricatures

3
Dick Williams’ caricature of Suzanne and Rowland

4
Man

5
two Dudes