The Art of Rebellion
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/08/09/books/review/Heller-t.html
By STEVEN HELLER
Published: August 6, 2009
If not for Mad magazine, there might never have been (in no
particular order) 1960s youth culture, underground comics, Wacky
Packs, "Laugh-In," "Saturday Night Live," R. Crumb, Art Spiegelman or
an age of irony, period. Mad, which began in 1952 as a comic book
that parodied "serious" comics as well as American popular culture,
with an emphasis on television, movies and advertising, was conceived
and originally edited by Harvey Kurtzman (1924-93), a Brooklyn-born
comic-strip artist, writer and editor. Kurtzman was the spiritual
father of postwar American satire and the godfather of
late-20th-century alternative humor. If this seems like hyperbole,
all you have to do is read The Art of Harvey Kurtzman: The Mad Genius
of Comics (Abrams ComicArts, $40), Denis Kitchen and Paul Buhle's
insightful, entertaining and profusely illustrated (with rare images
of original work) biographical monograph, which chronicles almost
everything Kurtzman accomplished and that was quite a lot.
"In Mad and all his subsequent ventures," the authors write,
"Kurtzman drew a bead on the phony aspects and idiosyncrasies of
modern commercial culture. . . . He took on Senator Joseph McCarthy
as surely and seriously in the pages of Mad as Edward R. Murrow did
on television." He also fought against a wave of comic-art censorship
that overtook the country in the '50s and fostered the restrictive
Comics Code (echoing the role of the Hays Office for motion pictures).
Soon after World War II, Corporal Kurtzman made drawings for Yank,
the Army's weekly magazine. But his talents were really unleashed in
his first comic-book job, doing so-called filler pages titled "Hey
Look!" This was an absurdist collection of sequences produced for
Stan Lee's Timely Comics (later Marvel Comics) between 1946 and 1949.
As Kitchen and Buhle point out, Kurtzman slid under the radar there
and had "virtual free rein." His distinctive, frenetic minimalism,
condensed lettering and rebuslike signature ("H. Kurtz," with a
little figure of a "man" at the end) were developed during the course
of this strip. It served as the steppingstone for some of his most
historically significant contributions to comic art.
In the late '40s Kurtzman sold a short-lived experimental strip,
"Silver Linings," to The New York Herald Tribune, but it was his work
with the legendary E.C. Comics that ignited his career. Founded by M.
C. Gaines, a comics pioneer, and inherited by his son, Bill, the
original Educational Comics company evolved from a formulaic
publisher into a groundbreaker, taking on the name Entertaining
Comics. Kurtzman was a force in this change. In 1950 he began drawing
horror and sci-fi comics, including "Tales From the Crypt" and "Weird
Science" and thus a new, more vivid and gruesome style of comic was
born. According to the authors, E.C.'s sci-fi comics became known for
"antiracist intimations" and "warnings against atomic doomsday," as
well as "fantastically busty women in space outfits." And "by 1953,
E.C.'s horror titles had circulations hovering around 400,000 each."
(Today these comics are heralded as precursors to current horror films.)
Among the most popular comics on the E.C. list were Kurtzman's two
war series, "Frontline Combat" and "Two-Fisted Tales," which
displayed a realism not present in similar comic books. Although
Kurtzman honestly believed that gore was not suitable for children,
he was nonetheless driven by a storyteller's need to be truthful and
not romanticize horror. In Kurtzman's war stories, Kitchen and Buhle
write, "rascals as well as moralists would meet their demise. . . .
Redemption, if it could be found at all, demanded cleareyed
understanding of frightful realities."
While Kurtzman is celebrated for the early days of Mad, his tales
about the Korean War have been too often overlooked. They prefigure
recent novels and films that demythologize warfare. In "Corpse on the
Imjin!," a six-page story he created for "Two-Fisted Tales," war is
embodied in a solitary G.I. watching an enemy corpse float downriver
the drawing of the half-submerged form is heartbreaking. As the
soldier speculates on how the man died, he is set upon by a North
Korean and becomes entangled in vividly choreographed hand-to-hand
combat. After the Korean is killed, the American engages in some
soul-searching. "Kurtzman's thoughtful, more realistic and human
depictions of war," the authors write, "were in stark contrast with
competing gung-ho war comic books that glorified war, almost never
displayed moral ambiguity and frequently featured Koreans as garishly
yellow-skinned and bucktoothed 'gooks.' "
After largely concentrating on war, he decided to turn to humor, and
Mad was "Kurtzman's baby from the first moment of its
conceptualization." For the first 23 issues it was a comic book, but
Kurtzman had long wanted to edit a "slick" magazine, in an effort to
legitimize the comic medium. Bill Gaines resisted for some time, but
the July 1955 issue marked a radical format change (Kurtzman designed
the illuminated logo that identified Mad for decades). It was so
successful it prompted an immediate reprint. Actually, the altered
format was propitious: since Mad was no longer a comic book, it was
not subject to the Comics Code, which had severe consequences for E.C.
Kitchen, an underground comic artist and publisher, and Buhle, a
historian of comics, superbly chronicle the rise of E.C. and its fall
at the hands of restrictive Congressional investigations in 1954
Senator Estes Kefauver opened hearings in New York investigating
sadism and racism in comics, with Bill Gaines as "his chief (hostile)
witness" and a cowardly, self-regulating comic-book industry. The
liberal psychologist Fredric Wertham had charged in his book
"Seduction of the Innocent" that comics harmed children. Although Mad
could have been condemned under this blanket indictment, the fact
that it was no longer a comic book saved it from certain demise.
Kurtzman eventually left Mad to work on various other, lesser-known
humor magazines: Trump (published by Hugh Hefner), Humbug, and Help!
(which prefigured National Lampoon). For a generation of boomers who
grew up hoarding Playboy, his collaboration with the artist Will
Elder on a comic strip about the buxom Little Annie Fanny the
anti-Betty and anti-Veronica provided a teenage rite of passage.
I have another memory of Kurtzman. A few years before he died, I was
with him at a restaurant when he was having a brief meeting with an
art director from an ad agency. Kurtzman had accepted an advertising
job to earn some much-needed cash. I watched this iconoclastic
humorist acquiesce as the art director altered everything Kurtzman
had done, removing all the humor and leaving only the style. Maybe
it's a good thing the authors were unaware of this anecdote; their
book is probably better off without it.
Underground cartoonists of the '60s and '70s knelt before two
deities: Harvey Kurtzman and Paul Krassner. Kurtzman you know about.
Krassner was the editor and publisher of The Realist, considered the
first underground-press periodical, a product of the Beat and
anti-McCarthy movements. While The Realist was rather conventionally
designed compared with the psychedelic underground newspapers that
began springing up during the mid- to late '60s, it was more ribald
and raucous than anything in print scandalous, borderline libelous
and even pornographic. It was the next evolutionary step in
counterculture satire after Mad. And it is cited by Jay Lynch, an
underground cartoonist known for the strip "Nard 'n Pat," in the
introduction to James Danky and Denis Kitchen's Underground Classics:
The Transformation of Comics Into Comix (Abrams ComicArts/Chazen
Museum of Art, $29.95). As Lynch says, The Realist bitingly attacked
"the sham and hypocrisy of society at large" and was one of a few
magazines that contributed to the rise of the underground comix sensibility.
This collection of essays, reproductions of original art, and
mechanicals of comics pages and covers is a nice complement to the
Kurtzman book. Primarily the catalog for a traveling exhibition, it
includes images that will be familiar to anyone who grew up with the
undergrounds and captivating to those who did not a good
substitute if you can't see the exhibition.
I was happy to be reintroduced to Dope Comix; Spain Rodriguez's
Trashman, one of my favorite antiheroes of the day; and Gilbert
Shelton's "Fabulous Furry Freak Brothers" (the Abbott and Costello of
the dope generation) and "Billy Graham Reaches the Dope Mystics." But
the book is worth the price if only for the superb reproduction of
Rick Griffin's "Fighting Eyeballs." Griffin, who rendered the
original Rolling Stone magazine logo in the '60s, was Hieronymus
Bosch on mushrooms, as evidenced by his astonishingly precise surreal
assemblage of eyes fighting eyes in a sci-fi dystopia.
Griffin died in a motorcycle accident. Yet many of the other artists,
currently in their 60s and 70s, are still quite active. This is not
(as the title suggests) the definitive collection of all their
classics, but it is a satisfying representation of some of their
greatest hits.
The visual language of rebellion has a few commonalities that are
adapted to individual cultures and countries. The images in Zeina
Maasri's Off the Wall: Political Posters of the Lebanese Civil War
(I. B. Tauris/Palgrave Macmillan, paper, $29.95) are stylistically
similar to some of the underground comics created in the '60s. But
the messages in Lebanon from the '70s to the early '90s were
decidedly more serious than those in the United States. Underground
comics were concerned with sex and drugs, among other favored themes;
the Lebanese activists were concerned with survival and victory.
American undergrounders faced nightsticks and Mace when they
demonstrated against government policy; the Lebanese factions used
lethal weapons.
This is not a picture book per se, although it is well illustrated
with black-and-white and color plates. Maasri, an associate professor
of graphic design at the American University of Beirut, provides a
detailed analysis of the nature of graphic propaganda and of the
issues Lebanon faced during its civil war, along with explanations of
various symbols and motifs. The book also includes a provocative
chapter on martyrdom. Most of the images reproduced here did not
break any new design territory which makes sense. They were meant
to function in a cluttered visual environment amid many messages.
There are the requisite portraits of martyrs and a few anti-Israel
protests (one with the swastika embedded in a Star of David). But
there is one poster in particular that caught my eye for its
conceptual curiosity. The designer is anonymous, and it is titled
"Towards Independence." It looks pixelated, like a Whitman's Sampler
box, and depicts a figure running with a torch. In the heat of a
civil war, such a well-designed composition makes it seem as if the
conflict were basically the Olympic Games.
One of the most common visual genres of the modern age is the
anthropometric photo, known as the mug shot. These pictorial records
of arrests, usually showing the full face and profile of the accused,
are employed by police agencies the world over, and have barely
changed their basic format since being introduced in the 19th
century. It is axiomatic that mug shots are not flattering. The
bright lights are meant to highlight every defining facial feature,
and there is no allowance for aesthetic nuance. Nonetheless, mug
shots can be fascinating, particularly those of the same person over
time, or of famous people when they were young. Raynal Pellicer's Mug
Shots: An Archive of the Famous, Infamous, and Most Wanted (Abrams,
$35) offers many interesting ones. As the front jacket, with its
pictures of Jimi Hendrix and Jim Morrison, suggests, the book
includes arrest photos of rock stars whose pedigree depended on their
brushes with the law. Some musicians, like David Bowie and Johnny
Cash, look pretty cool in their shots. Then there are infamous
political figures: Stalin, Lenin, Trotsky and Mussolini (with a full
head of hair), all of them arrested before rising to power, of
course. The anarchist Emma Goldman appears in three mug shots from
1893 and 1901 and during her deportation to Russia in 1919; the years
were certainly hard on her.
In fact, anarchists have their own section. The photos of Santo
Caserio, who fatally stabbed the president of France in 1894, and
Leon Czolgosz, who shot President William McKinley in 1901, seem as
if they could have been taken yesterday. There are sections on war
criminals (including a defiant Hermann Goering) and civil rights
leaders (including Martin Luther King and Malcolm X). There is also
an eerie color frame of Lee Harvey Oswald, who is most commonly
represented in black and white. The longest section is devoted to
notorious mobsters, notably Al Capone (who doesn't look so sinister).
This well-designed book took form when Pellicer, a French documentary
film producer and director, uncovered caches of mug shots preserved
on glass plates, film negatives or paper prints at the Police
Headquarters Museum in Paris and the National Archives in France and
the United States. Brief but informative accounts accompany the
images and "are intended to report reality and give the facts without
ever interpreting them," Pellicer writes. "This is first and foremost
a book of stories, not a history book." Indeed, these faces tell some
amazing stories.
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So Many Books ... And So Little Time
I can't think of a better way to launch a Comic-Con-centric column
than with "Underground Classics: The Transformation of Comics Into
Comix" by James Danky and Denis Kitchen (Harry N. Abrams, 143 pages,
$29.95). This large-format treat launched to accompany an
exhibition at the Chazen Museum of Art at the University of
Wisconsin, Madison, where Danky is on the faculty (Kitchen's a
longtime cartoonist-writer) puts the emphasis on the artwork, with
124 full-color illustrations and 30 black-and-whites.
There are also solid essays by Paul Buhle, Trina Robbins and Patrick
Rosenkranz and an intro by Jay Lynch all nicely illustrated that
give major props to the artists as well as provide historical
context. But it's the full-page plates that carry the day: Wondrous
works by Bill Griffith ("Young Lust"), Leslie Cabarga ("Dope Comix"),
Gilbert Shelton ("The Fabulous Furry Freak Brothers"), R. Crumb (too
many to count) and many other stars of the movement, plus my all-time
favorites, the Air Pirates (if only I had kept my copy of the first
"Mickey Mouse Meets the Air Pirates Funnies"!).
The beatniks would have secretly enjoyed being saluted in "The Beats:
A Graphic History" (Hill and Wang, 199 pages, $22) even as they would
have publicly dissed it.
This is a terrific compilation, with too many names to mention: Text
by Harvey Pekar, Trina Robbins and others; edited by Paul Buhle; art
by Mary Fleener, Gary Dumm, Ed Piskor and many other imaginative souls.
And, all sorts of beats get their time in the spotlight: Gregory
Corso as well as big-name Jack Kerouac, Tuli Kupferberg as well as
Allen Ginsberg, and on and on. The mix of artists' work serves the
mix of subjects well; "The Beats" could almost serve as an
introduction to the graphic novel format itself.
...
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