Bernard Krigstein: Fine Artist and Comic Book Artist

It seems that Bernard Krigstein (1919-1990) was a Fine Arts guy at heart, yet for 15 or so years he illustrated comic books and actually appreciated what he was doing. Some background is here and here.

Before his time -- the late 1940s and the 1950s -- the quality of comic book art was generally mediocre. Perhaps some of that was due to the large number of separate images required for, say, a six-page story. Production speed was and is an important economic concern in that field. But during the 1930s there emerged examples of well done art in newspaper comic strips. Examples include "Tarzan" by Hal Foster and Burne Hogarth, "Terry and the Pirates" by Milton Caniff, and Alex Raymond's "Flash Gordon."

Krigstein and some others upped comic book artistic quality as well as experimented with the means of presentation of sequential events.

His training and inclinations along with clashes with comic book editors and publishers caused him to drift into general illustration and then to teaching art while doing painting on the side.

In comic book / sequential graphic novel world, his work is highly regarded and honored for its quality, innovation and versatility. Some examples are presented below.

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An illustration from around late 1942 or early 1943 featuring Bell P-39 Airacobras.

Page segment featuring tight, crisp drawing and use of solid black areas.

Lead page of a comics story where Krigstein makes used of bold inking.  (He generally did his own inking, usual for comic books.  I do not know for sure if he inked the images above, however.)  Update: Bill Peckmann informs me that Krigstein did do the inking.

Part of the final page of his epic "Master Race" story.  Here he makes use of a kind of stop-motion, slow motion effect that was used in some 1970s movies and seen fairly frequently in recent years in graphic novels.

This is sheer opinion on my part, but I think all those little pictures slow down the reality of what he is depicting.  A possible alternative would be, following the first image, to have a panel something like my doodle above showing the man slipping and starting to fall onto the subway tracks, and then cutting to the final panel above.  It would be quick, as in reality, and readers could easily fill in the details via imagination.

Krigstein also illustrated a book dealing with baseball.  Here it is necessary to break action down into significant steps.

The first and second pages of "The Flying Machine," set in Japan.  Here Krigstein makes use of simple penwork and designs suggestive of classical Japanese prints.  Note that the uncolored version is much more appealing than the colored appearance found in the comic book.  Innovative for its time, as usual.

Moving on from his comics career, here is a Krigstein pen and wash drawing.

Self-portrait.

Scorchy Smith's Adventure Comic Strip Style Legacy

For several decades, American comic strips have been shrunken (compared to 1940s sizes), humor-oriented creatures. But from roughly 1930 into the 1960s there were many plot-driven strips with day-to-day continuity extending for months. The motivation of newspapers for featuring such strips was that they captured the attention of readers who became more likely to buy that particular paper on a daily basis.

Some continuity strips dealt with romance, but most were adventure oriented. There were Africa strips such as Tarzan, the Phantom, and Jungle Jim. There were science-fiction strips such as Buck Rogers and Flash Gordon. Among a number of other categories was the aviation-centered comic strip.

One such aviation strip, "Scorchy Smith," brought together some artists who evolved or practiced a distinctive, representational, chiaroscuro style of drawing for comic strips. Yes, there were other comics in the key mid-1930s to mid-'40s era that also were artistically superior. But the aviation strips are worth examination in their own right.

Although he didn't initiate Scorchy Smith, it was Noel Sickles who transformed its visual style as I posted here.

A co-worker at Associated Press and good friend of Sickles was Milton Caniff, who at about the same time began the famous "Terry and the Pirates" comic strip. Influenced by Sickles (who quit drawing Scorchy in the fall of 1936 to become an illustrator), Caniff slowly evolved the strip's style from thinly lined images into lushly brushworked, strikingly composed scenes that made him one of the most honored conic strip artists of his day. His skill at plotting and characterization added to this.

After World War 2, Caniff left Terry and the Pirates, being replaced by George Wunder, who I wrote about here.

One of the many artists who drew Scorchy Smith was Frank Robbins, active 1939-1944. In the summer of '44 Robbins launched the "Johnny Hazard" strip that in appearance and content was not far removed from Terry and the Pirates.

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A Noel Sickles "Scorchy Smith" strip for 20 October, 1936 -- one of the last that Sickles drew,

"Terry and the Pirates" for 2 January, 1934, showing Caniff's original style.

Terry for 3 October, 1936: his style about the time Sickles dropped Scorchy Smith. They were headed in the same direction, but Sickles was more advanced.

18 January, 1938 -- Caniff is doing better depicting people than he did a year or so before.

Now, 1 August, 1941 we find dramatic chiaroscuro.

By 24 March, 1945 Caniff's classical style has emerged.

Here is a Scorchy strip for 15 February, 1941 drawn by Frank Robbins. He was a skilled artist, doing fine art as well as comics, and his work is comparable to Caniff's at his point.

A late Scorchy strip by Robbins (24 February, 1944). Now he seems to be lagging behind Caniff.

Lead panels from a Robbins Sunday "Johnny Hazard" from the mid-1950s. Here his work is richer, more like that a of Caniff and George Wunder who was drawing Terry by then.

Jim Holdaway: Modesty Blaise Illustrator

Jim Holdaway (1927–1970) died of a heart attack a few months shy of his 43rd birthday. Like some other talented artists who died young, he had already become famous. This for comic strip fans due to his work during the early years of "Modesty Blaise." Some background information is here and here.

The strip was launched in London's Evening Standard newspaper. Since London papers were national in scope, syndication opportunities in the United Kingdom were limited and that was a constraint on British strips -- potential income streams were limited compared to those in the continent-wide American newspaper scene.

Nevertheless, Modesty Blaise caught on, largely due to Holdaway's art, and it was syndicated in many parts of the Commonwealth as well as in the USA.

Holdaway combined skilled representational drawing with the ability to compose a variety of dramatic viewpoints even in one three-panel strip. His basic approach was to include strongly shaped areas of pure black with thin pen or brush lines. He also made use of cross-hatching and sometimes even downplayed the black if that suited the scene he was depicting.

Below are some sample strips grabbed from various Web sites intended to give you a sense of what he accomplished. Click on them to enlarge.

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Especially note the middle panel's detailing.  Yes, the sidewalk's perspective is exaggerated, but the Rolls-Royce is convincingly done.

This strip is sparing in black areas, but Holdaway added some cross-hatching to liven things. He was very good at indicating folds in clothings.

I include this to show he was good at doing ships of various kinds.

Making Modest Blaise convincing, Holdaway made sure to draw cars such as the Citroën DS-19 and Mercedes 300 accurately.

These panels show Holdaway's talent for dramatic use of scene illumination.

Zack Mosley's Character-Driven Smilin' Jack Comic

In the 1930s most American adventure-type comic strips lacked illustrator-quality artwork. One example I used here was the Buck Rogers strip drawn by Dick Calkins. There were a few comic strips that featured convincing depictions -- especially those by Alex Raymond (Flash Gordon) and Hal Foster (Tarzan, and Prince Valiant).

So quality artwork was not necessary for popular appeal, as there were a number of strips in those days that were as successful as Raymond's and Foster's. Those other adventure strips tended to feature adequate depictions given the constraints of the size of panels as they appeared in print and the need to crank out artwork at a pace necessary for daily and sometimes daily-plus-Sunday publication. That is, corners had to be cut even though a successful strip allowed the main artist to hire one or more assistants to help out.

But the main reasons for an adventure strip's success were plotting and characters. Readers had to be pulled along by the action, anticipating each day what might happen next. And the characters had to be interesting enough that readers didn't lose interest in them.

An example of this was the long-lived (1933-1973) comic strip Smilin' Jack by Zack Mosley (1906-1993).  A detailed appreciation worth reading is here.

Smilin' Jack was an adventure strip featuring airplanes, one of several in the 1930s and later. Mosley included drawings of planes as much as he could, placing a tiny one in the background if he couldn't find an excuse to make it more prominent. His drawings of people were marginal. They were simply done, useful for rapid production and appearance in comparatively small space on newspaper pages. But their anatomy -- especially for shapely women -- was distorted. In later decades he tended to make heads and faces too large compared to the rest of bodies. Perhaps that was due to shrinking publication size and a need to somehow compensate.

The strip had a limited set of consistently-appearing characters. This was true of most adventure comics. But the Smilin' Jack cast might have been a little smaller than average around the end of the '30s. Most prominent were Jack himself, a heavy Polynesian named Fat Stuff (or Fatstuff) and Downwind Jaxon, another pilot who often stole the show from Jack.

As the second link above describes it, Mosley wanted to add a character who was really handsome and more successful attracting women than Jack himself (some of the plots dealt more with love life than flying). But he couldn't draw a really handsome face to his satisfaction. So that character, Downwind, was always shown is a pose where his face was averted (usually) or hidden by an object or a speech balloon (sometimes).

(Aside for non-aviation buffs: the term "downwind" has highly negative implications for pilots. One should, if at all possible, never take off or land downwind -- with the wind blowing the same direction as the airplane. That's because airspeed (the speed at which the craft is encountering the air) is lower than its apparent ground speed. For example, a given plane's stalling speed is 100 miles per hour. If it is on final approach for a downwind landing traveling at 110 MPH ground speed but has a 20 MPH tailwind, its airspeed (the flow of air over the front of the wing) is only 90 MPH. That's below its stalling speed, so the airplane will crash rather than accomplish a normal landing.)

Below are some Smilin' Jack panels taken from the Internet. Click to enlarge.

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This features Downwind. The other character is Jack himself.

Fat Stuff: his shirt buttons are continually popping off, so Mosley eventually added a chicken that likes to eat them.

The "Dixi" in the final scene refers to a previous girlfriend of Jack's.

Some panels from 1939. In the lower two a photographer snaps a picture of Downwind's face and what happened next.

The April 20, 1940 Sunday strip featuring Fat Stuff and Downwind.-- and an airplane.

Alden McWilliams' Tom Corbett, Space Cadet Comic Books

Alden McWilliams (1916-1993) was one of those comparatively rare comics artists of his generation who could draw people convincingly. I wrote about his work on the Twin Earths comic strip here. Some biographical information can be found here and here.

One of McWilliams' projects was creating content for Tom Corbett, Space Cadet comic books. For detailed information about those comic books, click here.

McWilliams did cover art for eleven of those comic books, but interior art for only the first three. Those were issued February, May and August of 1952, which suggests that he did his work from the late summer of 1951 into the winter of 1952 (considering production lead-times). His Twin Earths daily comic strip debuted 16 June 1952, so he probably began working on it no later than early April of that year. Therefore, if there was any overlap for those projects aside from creating covers, it was minimal, so McWilliams could maintain the high quality of his work.  A strong possibility is that he chose to drop doing Space Cadet interior content when he got the Twin Earths gig: otherwise, he might have contunued Space Cadet.

Tom Corbett, Space Cadet started as a television show that began airing in 1950 and later bounced around several TV networks. This meant that the comic books had to portray the characters as personified by the show's actors. That is, McWilliams was doing portrait art as part of comic book art.

Below are some scans I made of the second and third issues of the comic book. They include the cover, one interior colored page and one page without color (the latter was always on the inside cover). Click on the images to enlarge.

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Inside cover of the August 1952 issue. It shows the leading cast members of the TV show who McWilliams had to depict convincingly in the comic books to satisfy fans.

Cover of the May 1952 issue.

Color page from May 1952.

Black & white page from May 1952.

Cover of August 1952 issue.

August 1952 color page.

Black & white page, August 1952.

Otto Soglow: From The New Masses to The Little King

Otto Soglow (1900-1975) was a successful comic strip cartoonist. His Little King character first appeared in The New Yorker magazine in 1930 and became a Hearst Sunday strip in 1934. Thereafter, it ran for more than 40 years until Soglow died.

His Wikipedia entry is here, but it's brief. A much more comprehensive survey of his career can be found here.

Soglow received some of his art training from John Sloan who, among other things, was involved in leftist politics, and helped Soglow get some cartoons published in The Liberator. Soglow also contributed work to The New Masses.

Around the same time he was contributing to The New Masses, Soglow began having cartoons published in The New Yorker, a brand-new magazine intended for sophisticates in that city and elsewhere. Also at this time his style was evolving from the Sloan-Masses-Ashcan style to highly simplified Moderne. His Little King retained that style over its 45-year overall existence.

It was an interesting transformation Soglow made -- from socialist content to taking William Randolph Hearst's shilling and drawing a royal cartoon character.

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A New Masses cartoon from 1926. The caption is "Iss diss a system?"

Poster for a 1932 New Masses ball. Its style is now Moderne, like his Little King cartoons.

A color panel. The Little King was always dressed in red. His personality was such that he didn't take kinship seriously and always did playful things.

His new royal portrait.

More playfulness.

Alden McWilliams' "Twin Earths" Artwork

The first, and perhaps the most famous, science-fiction comic strip was Buck Rogers which debuted in January 1929. Others of that genre followed, the best-known of these was Flash Gordon which featured the highest quality artwork of the lot, certainly in its earliest years when Alex Raymond wielded his pen and brush.

The only other American sci-fi strip with top-notch artwork that I'm aware of off-hand was Twin Earths (1952-1963), created by publications maestro Oskar Lebeck (1903-1966), who did the writing in the early years and Alden McWilliams (1916-1993), who did the art. I will probably write more about McWilliams in another post, but shall focus on Twin Earths here.

The concept of Twin Earths was that there existed a totally Earth-like planet that shared Earth's orbit but at exactly the opposite side -- 180 degrees away. This meant that, as of 1952 when the strip started, there was no way we on Earth could detect Terra, as it was called. Terrans were a few hundred years ahead of Earth technologically, so could visit here using their flying saucer spacecraft. Another quirk was that their population was 90 percent female. Yet another was that they had lifespans exceeding 150 years, yet preserved youthful appearances over most of that time.

The opening few months of panels can be found here. A Terran female agent reveals her identity to an FBI agent, the male hero of the strip. Then things flow from there.

The Seattle Times newspaper suffered a strike in 1953, and when it ended the paper published special sections displaying all the comics that would have been printed during the time of the strike. I recently made scans of these for Twin Earths, and two of these are displayed below. At this point in the strip's development, the plotting wasn't very interesting. Mostly it was presenting the futuristic marvels of Terra, contrasting them with 1953 Earth. There was a bit of romance-related activity, but no space wars or bug-eyed monsters.

I'll comment further in the captions, but want to stress McWilliams' artwork. Grinding out comics panels day after day can make corner-cutting tempting. Yet McWilliams didn't seem to fall into that mode very often, maintaining a commendably even strain.

Click on the images to enlarge.

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I don't think the dialog regarding electromagnetism set readers' hearts to beating faster. But Ah! the artwork. The compositional variety. The poses of the characters, the shifting points of view. And those seriously attractive women. McWilliams could do it all.

This set deals with Terra's contact with a planet from another solar system.

George Wunder's Terry and the Pirates Background Detailing

American newspaper comic strips were greatly reduced in size decades ago and their content was reduced to various kinds of humor. Gone were the plot-continuity strips occupying a half or even a full page such as were found in 1930s Sunday papers.

One such strip was Terry and the Pirates, an adventure series taking place in China. When World War 2 came along, it evolved into a military-themed strip. By late 1946 Milton Caniff, its creator, had tired of the distribution syndicate's control and moved on to create an Air Force themed adventure strip.

Due to its popularity, Terry was continued by another artist, George S. Wunder (1912-1987) -- Wikipedia entry here. Wunder has been criticized, with some justification, for his treatment of faces. But what interests me here is the degree of background detailing found in his version of Terry, a carryover from strips of the 1930s and still common into the 1950s. That is, Wunder ranked up there with other cartoonists whose strips still went well beyond containing mostly faces and dialog balloons.

Background settings require a lot of extra work for the cartoonist who was under pressure to maintain about a six-week backlog to allow for production and distribution to newspapers carrying the strip (and for times when the artist was ill or otherwise not productive). The link to Wunder mentions that he took on an assistant in 1962, implying he did it all before that time (and stating that he continued to do the Sunday strips alone). A rational division of labor would be for the main artist to deal with the characters and leave backgrounds and other detailing to assistants.

Below are some examples of Wunder's Terry and the Pirates from his first five years on the job. Click on the images to enlarge.

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October 27, 1947
A daily panel featuring Terry, Pat Ryan, Hotshot Charlie and slang-talking Chopstick Joe who is always on the lookout for making money.

June 22, 1947
Now for some Sunday strips...

July 13, 1947

May 1, 1949

July 31, 1949

September 22, 1951
This seems to be original art -- note how the title and artist's name are attached to provide consistent branding over time.

Guilty Pleasures: Will Eisner's Women

Will Eisner (1917-2005), businessman and philosopher-practitioner of cartooning, was an important innovator in that corner of the illustration world. His Wikipedia entry is here. I mentioned him here in conjunction with my visit to the comic strip museum in Brussels.

My guilty pleasure having to do with Eisner is ogling the beautiful girls he included in his works. Most are found in his famous Spirit comic book insert for newspapers. Some are shown below, as is a character he created for a U.S. Army publication dealing with equipment maintenance that I used to read in my army days.

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Book cover featuring a Spirit femme fatale.

Eisner was especially good with eyes.

Apparently the head required some tweaking here.

The Spirit and a babe are stranded on a desert island so small there is no room for the obligatory palm tree.

P'Gell, featured in a number of Spirit episodes.

Here she is again.

A one-off by Eisner for a friend.

PS The Preventive Maintenance Monthly is covered by Wikipedia here. Above is a recurring character, Miss Connie Rodd. Without her, PS readership would have been drastically fewer.

Let me explain her name to non- English speakers and others not familiar with piston-driven motors. It refers to connecting rods that link pistons to crank shafts. Her first name, Connie, is a diminutive of Constance, and the extra "d" on the last name creates an actual last name found here and there.

In the first image of Connie, she is all dressed up, something unusual. Normally Eisner had her dressed in army fatigue clothing as seen here. Note how skillfully Eisner depicts her gestures in the bottom image.