[Al Jaffee] started at Mad not as an artist but as a writer….Eventually, he said, the sketches he used to illustrate his ideas caught the eye of Nick Meglin, an editor, who realized they were funnier than what the artists were producing….So Mr. Jaffee became a writer-artist. And in 1964 he had an idea. Playboy, Life and other magazines had their lavish color fold-outs, so Mad, he thought, should parody them with a cheap black-and-white fold-in.

I’m not sure that Al Jaffee’s amazing “fold-ins” for Mad Magazine really have anything to do with my goofy poems, but the textual parts sure do spark my imagination:

It’s a gimmick, but a beautifully executed one that includes content and illuminates something. Which brings up the question, “If something starts as a gimmick but produces the effect of art, is it still a gimmick?”

Links:

• NyTimes: “A Veteran Mad Man Remains in the Fold“
• NyTimes: “Fold-Ins, Past and Present (Interactive feature)“
• Absolutely Mad Magazine: 50+ Years

From Nigel Holmes’ out-of-print Pictorial Maps:

Before showing the pilot script of his revolutionary show Twin Peaks to executives at ABC television, director David Lynch drew a map to give them an idea of where the action would unfold. The peaks of the title, and the town they name, are clearly visible as white-topped mountains rising out of the modeled landscape. By creating a sense of place, Lynch made the town all the more believable. A straightforward map would have been dull by comparison and might have suggested that there was something intrinsically interesting avout the geography of the place. What was much more important to convey was the mood of the story, and it’s nicely captured in Lynch’s quirky drawing. Not many maps in this book attempt to convey both a mood and data, but it can be done, and Lynch’s map shows that information can be imbued with emotion and retain its factual authority.

And more from Lynch:

We knew where everything was, and it helped us decide what mood each place had, and what could happen there. Then the characters just introduced themselves to us and walked into the story.

Since people dug the previous post, here’s another letter—short this time—from collage artist Winston Smith sent to me in 1997 (I was still 13). In this one, Winston raps about saving money by not being addicted to cigarettes, the greatness of Leonardo Da Vinci, and Anti-Nazi German collage artist John Heartfield (who, coincidentally, worked with George Grosz).

Read the whole thing as a flickr set (with enlarged scans).

Read Winston’s first letter

The year was 1997. I was 13 years old. Green Day was the coolest band in the world. Two years previous, they’d just put out their album, Insomniac, with an insane-looking cover. I checked out the liner notes, and found out it was done by a collage artist named Winston Smith:

I had a great art teacher, Robyn Helsel, who assigned us a project where we had to pick a contemporary artist and write to them. Most of the class picked their artists out of a catalog. I picked Winston. I used my dad’s e-mail account and sent probably half a dozen e-mails to a gallery curator I found online, asking for Winston’s home address. The curator finally replied: “Stop bugging me, kid. Here’s his address.” I sent Winston a two-page letter using a ransom note font in Microsoft Word, telling him about me and my band, asking him about his technique, his influences…I even had the audacity to include a sketch of an idea I had for a piece he might want to attempt. (I have the letter somewhere…but unfortunately, not the sketch!) A few months went by. As I remember it, nobody in the class heard back from their artist.

Then one day a huge, stuffed manila envelope came in the mail. I ran to the kitchen table, tore it open, and dumped out its contents. There was a 14-page hand-written note from Winston and probably 50 pages of color photocopies of his work and press clippings. I couldn’t believe it. An artist—a real artist!—had written me back!

To me, it was the equivalent of Rilke writing back to the young poet. He told me about his life and his methods. He urged me to always question authority, stay away from drugs, and keep getting straight As so one day I could pay the bills. (An artist—a real artist!—was telling me it was okay to get straight As!) I’d never heard anybody talk about the kind of things he wrote about—art, America, growing up in a small-town—it was like a time-bomb that went off in my brain.

The letter, and I’m not exaggerating, changed my life.

I wrote him back, and he wrote me back. We’ve kept up a casual correspondence since.

I was at my mom’s over the holidays, and decided to use her new scanner to
archive some papers I wanted to preserve for safe-keeping.

I’m not sure if it will interest anyone else, but I’m posting it here as a shining example of great generosity from an established artist to an aspiring artist. It’s one of my most treasured possessions, and I just really freaking love it and want to share it.

And so, with Winston’s permission, here it is. (Also: be sure to check out Winston’s work and buy some of his stuff!)

VIEW THE WHOLE LETTER AS A FLICKR SET

(more…)

I scanned a bunch of drawings out of John Porcellino’s memoir of his teenage years, Perfect Example, to share with you…and then I realized that if I put all the drawings in a certain order, they told a little story:

I don’t think I’ve talked a lot about Porcellino and King-Cat on this blog. He’s definitely one of my favorite cartoonists. It’s amazing to read the King-Cat collection King-Cat Classix and watch his drawings evolve from punk-zine scribbles to zen-like elegant lines. At their best, his comics are pure poetry — nothing extraneous, perfect and simple. Looking forward to his adaptation of Thoreau’s Walden.

Pimps of Death (1919)

“It was my first encounter with the works of the German artist George Grosz, when I was in my twenties, which showed me that drawing need not just be a space-filler in a newspaper: in the hands of an honest man, drawing could be a weapon against evil….Look at [his drawings] and you know the world is sick. You may say that he was sick too — but it is a common mistake to believe that sick drawings indicate a sick mind, rather than a reflective indictment of society. His drawings scream indelibly of human depravity; they are an eloquently barbaric response to life and death, right through the First World War and into the wild, helpless excesses of 1920s Berlin, which rotted away the lives of all those caught up in its suicidal glee.”
—Ralph Steadman

My first encounter with George Grosz (1893-1959) was at the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s glorious show, “Glitter and Doom: German Portraits from the 1920s,” which we happened to stumble upon during our honeymoon to New York last year. After seeing his work, it was unsurprising to learn that Grosz had a major influence on some of my drawing heroes, including R. Crumb and Ralph Steadman. In the past week I’ve been sifting through a fat stack of his books borrowed from the art library in the hopes of sharing some scans of my favorite drawings. Barring “Pimps of Death” (shown above), the rest of the drawings are presented in chronological order.

Riot of the Insane (1915)

“Riot of the Insane” might be familiar to anyone who has a copy of Ivan Brunetti’s Anthology of Graphic Fiction — in the introduction Brunetti analyzes the piece in terms of cartooning:

I have been struggling lately with how to depict space, and specifically, people in space. These drawings are amazing to me because they look like they were drawn by someone who knew the rules but didn’t care about them.

Family (1916)

“Family” might be my favorite. The way the baby swings with four legs, the flowers, the dogs, the man’s face (what is he doing there? is he spying? bringing a message?), the crosses, the windmill, the way it looks like the sun is setting over a horizon that is several thousand feet above where it “should” be. And where did that tree come from?

Suburb (1917)

Many of these drawings came from the collection, Ecce Homo, — the words come from the Latin that Pilate spoke while presenting Christ: “Behold the man.” Some artists in Grosz’s circle took this to mean “How pitiable is man”; others “What a beast man is.”

Friedrichstrass (1918)

Eva (1918)

The more I look at these drawings, the more they look less like drawings and more like collages. It’s no coincidence — Grosz collaborated with the famous anti-Nazi photomontage artist John Heartfield.

The Guilty One remains unknown (1919)

It’s impossible for me to look at “Cross Section” as just a drawing:

Cross Section (1920)

It’s a confection.

Toads of Property (1921)

From the beginning, the models he looked to were not the plaster casts of antique sculptures he was forced to draw when he studied in Dresden and Berlin; they were, rather, taken from the realm of popular imagery. The figures he admired were not the heroes of antiquity and history but those of dime novels. Grosz studied and collected children’s drawings and toilet graffiti. He was fascinated by garish pictures of horrifying atrocities and catastrophes of the sort displayed at carnivals and riflemen’s gatherings, and he loved the lurid illustrations in western novels and detective stories. And of course he knew the great caricaturists of the past: William Hogarth, whom he explicitly names as a model, Honore Daumier, Wilhelm Busch. Over the years he extracted from these widely divergent sources a unique and characteristic drawing style. With this style, he prowled the metropolis, studying its marginal districts, circling around such subjects as crime, nightclubs, bordellos. He was fascinated by the lower depths of society and of people.—Matthias Eberle

I Shall Exterminate Everything around Me That Restricts Me from Being the Master (1921)

Further reading:

“One Day We’ll Get Even,” 57 drawings

George Grosz: An Autobiography

As Eddie Campbell pointed out, the new Comics Journal #286 features a 5-page essay and 37 color Sundays of Otto Soglow’s strip, “The Ambassador”, which first began life as “The Little King” in the pages of the New Yorker:

In the middle of 1930, Soglow introduced a new character that would launch the next stage of his career, an unnamed and silent King who trudges through his daily offices in a daze, longing for any excuse to step away from it all, even if just to pick up the milk at the castle door. By 1931, the “Little King,” as he came to be known, was a regular feature in the magazine’s pages, caught up in absurd rituals and ceremonies and longing to break away to the open road. The joke, for those who cared to look for it, depended primarily on Soglow’s long-running theme: In a society in which individuals are imprisoned by social categories like class, gender and sexuality, everyone is wearing costumes that fit as poorly as the King’s crown. Our little king no more belongs on the throne than Bill’s unnamed colleague belonged in the sewer. The King always jumped at any excuse to join the staff in the kitchen, to slide down the banister, even, in the last Little King cartoon for the New Yorker in 1934, to join the people in rioting against his monarchy.

But the King would not escape his crown so easily. Soglow’s Little King cartoons had attracted the attention of William Randolph Hearst, who determined to have Soglow and his King for his own empire. Hearst had become increasingly interested in silent comics, having acquired Milt Gross, author of the pioneering silent graphic novel, He Done Her Wrong (1930), and launching Carl Anderson’s largely silent Henry in 1932. The resurgence of pantomime comics in the early 1930s is an interesting phenomenon in its own right, especially given that it coincided with the rise of sound film. Just as the movies learned to talk, comics began to experiment with what they could accomplish without words….

…the New Yorker had another year on its contract for the character. And so Soglow was asked to create another title as a kind of placeholder until Little King could at last complete his move from magazine to newspaper. Appropriately, Soglow created his forerunner for the King’s arrival in the form of an Ambassador, and he used his first newspaper strip much as a diplomat might utilize a fact-finding mission to lay the groundwork for a royal visit. Soglow had worked almost exclusively in magazines up to this point, and the newspaper format was both exciting and somewhat overwhelming, as the early, somewhat stiff pages suggest. The Little King had appeared only occasionally in his years at the New Yorker, and now he would be expected to appear weekly. And so the Ambassador — a barely disguised version of the King himself — served as a stand-in, a place for Soglow to develop the character and his potential and to explore the possibilities (color, movement, scale) of the new medium.

I really, really love Soglow’s work, so I thought I would share a few of the original Little King strips that ran in the New Yorker.

The Little King sliding down a banister:

The Little King running away with gypsies:

The Little King losing a golf ball:

It’s worth noting that several of the strips were broken up and presented across a two-page spread:

And that several of them can be quite tender. Here, The Little King sheds a tear after being snubbed by a janitor:

And here, he contemplates the moon while the queen sleeps (I can relate):

Much of the development of Soglow’s style is explicitly attributed to his association with the New Yorker:

Harold Ross had founded his magazine in 1925, and Soglow began contributing the very next year. Ross wanted the comics in his new magazine to have a very different look than those of its illustrated predecessors: magazines like Puck and the original Life, with their Victorian crosshatchings and labored captions. He wanted the art in the New Yorker to serve as a visual representation of the modernist style he wished to capture, and he encouraged his cartoonists to reduce their work to the absolute minimal number of strokes and words.

The match was a good one for Soglow, who was at this time experimenting with “eliminating lines that I felt weren’t necessary.” Soglow’s earliest work for the New Yorker showed the influence of his fine-arts training and a rather conventional approach to the magazine comic, but quickly, under the influence of Ross and the artists at the magazine, Soglow began to develop what became his signature style: sequential comics, single-line drawing and minimal text.

In the very last Little King strip that ran in the New Yorker, the monarch riots along with the people:

And whether you noticed or not, if you’re a regular New Yorker reader, you get a dose of Soglow’s drawings every week: while Soglow was with the New Yorker, he drew every one of the small drawings that appeared at the beginning of each Talk of the Town article, and the magazine has been reusing the drawings ever since his death (over 25 years).

Soglow’s obituary from 1975:

Further reading:

The Comics Journal – Otto Soglow and The Ambassador (excerpt)

We All Go Soglow: a bunch of good scans of Soglow’s work

We’ll have to wait a little while until Drawn and Quarterly publishes the five-volume set of the complete run of Lynda Barry’s Ernie Pook’s Comeek, but in the meantime, there are a bunch of out-of-print collections out there…if you can find them. I’d like to start the week off by showing off a couple scans from two, GIRLS AND BOYS (1981), and EVERYTHING IN THE WORLD (1986).

* * *

BOYS + GIRLS was Lynda’s first book. Most of it is drawn in a scrawled, punky pen style — a crazy contrast to the fluid brushwork of something like ONE! HUNDRED! DEMONS! The strip was reformatted into a horizontal format, something that Chris Oliveros has emphasized will NOT be the case in the D + Q reissues.

Here I’ve restored her strip, “How To Draw Cartoons,” to its original square format:

Here’s a wacky clip of Lynda reading from the book in the the film COMIC BOOK CONFIDENTIAL:

And here’s a really cool photo of a poster advertising the book from around 1980.

* * *

EVERYTHING IN THE WORLD is a little more refined — it was Lynda’s fourth collection, and the drawings get better and better, but the content is still nutty and hilarious. The gems from this book are these little maps that serve as chapter dividers:

Here’s the strip “What Turns Men On”:

And the strip “How to Catch a Man”:

I found this King-Cat strip from John Porcellino to be a great match for them:

Like John P’s KING-CAT CLASSIX collection, I can only think that the five-volume Ernie Pook collection is gonna be nothing short of fantastic.

The Chicago Reader has an article on the amazing, enduring Anders Nilsen:

…just when doors started to open for Nilsen, he entered the most painful period of his life. Two years ago, at the age of 37, [his fiancee Cheryl] Weaver died after the sudden, devastating onset of Hodgkin’s disease. Afterward Nilsen buried himself in his work, creating two raw and intimate books dealing with her final days and his struggle to carry on without her, Don’t Go Where I Can’t Follow and The End. He was mourning, and he was doing it with more people paying attention to him than ever had before.

I buy everything of Nilsen’s I can get my hands on — his work makes me feel like everything I’ve done up until this point is silly, and it makes me want to go deeper, think bigger, work harder. I can’t recommend Don’t Go Where I Can’t Follow enough.

Words from James Kochalka, courtesy of Dan Stafford’s hand-written interviews with cartoonists:

Here’s a cool post from Tom Kealey about writing and the importance of play.