Essential Guide to World Comics

Tim Pilcher and Brad Brooks’s The Essential Guide to World Comics is a colorful, entertaining book into which to dip, packed with both facts and gossipy tidbits. And even though their introduction specifies this is “a guide and not a definitive encyclopedia of every title, every publisher and everyone who has ever worked on comics,” they still pretty much check off all the big names from around the globe — Osamu Tezuka of Japan (Tetsuwan-Atom), Hergé of Belgium, Hugo Pratt from Italy and bunches of other places, Jack Kirby from America, Dez Skinn the English editor and publisher, Jacques Tardi, Moebius and André Franquin (the Marsupilami, among others) of France, Jason of Norway ….

Also, decent time is spent on parts of the world whose comics many of us know little about, including India, Egypt, South Korea and the Philippines.

I do have a few minor concerns with this Essential Guide, though. Surely Jaime and Gilbert Hernandez deserve more than a one-sentence reference, given their influence.

And this simply seems odd: In the U.S. chapter, the authors write about Stan Lee, Jack Kirby and Steve Ditko; then Art Spiegelman, R. Crumb and other underground cartoonists; then Joe Sacco; then about Dark Horse Comics, followed by Neil Gaiman; then Dave Sim and Cerebus the Aardvark; then Spiegelman again and RAW; then Todd McFarlane and that gang; then Harvey Kurtzman, creator of MAD magazine; and ending with Will Eisner. What sort of order this? It doesn’t present a thematic progression, and it certainly is not chronological …. If you figure out what it is, leave a comment or send me an e-mail, please, because I don’t get it.

Of course, the one thing we really want from a reference guide, even if isn’t “an encyclopedia,” is accuracy. When mentioning Casterman Publishing’s marvelous À Suivre magazine, Pilcher and Brooks state it ran for 25 years, from 1978 to 1987. (À Suivre folded in 1997.)

Now, this could be the only error — surely a typo — in the entire book. But how do we know?

The Art of Harvey Kurtzman, Part 2

But wait, there’s more to recommend The Art of Harvey Kurtzman: Many pages are devoted to Kurtzman’s sketches, overlays and layouts he put together for collaborators to use for their drawings. It’s a fascinating study in how good magazine and comic-book illustration — and art editing —used to be done.

The bio itself follows Kurtzman’s many attempts to control his destiny. He was the creator and the brains of MAD (and he’s the one who had the brilliant idea of taking it from a comic book to a magazine format), but he didn’t own it. He tried his own business ventures, involving humor and/or satire publications, but none succeeded. Unlike, say, Will Eisner, creator of The Spirit (see “The Creator,” posted earlier), Kurtzman’s business sense didn’t hold a candle his artistic sense, the authors say.

Here’s one example: When in 1956 Kurtzman demanded legal control of MAD, owner Bill Gaines countered with an offer of a 10% equity share. Kurtzman walked. Five years later Gaines sold the popular magazine for $5 million. Kurtzman would have made $500,000.

This is a jam-packed book, rich with tales of the time and Kurtzman’s wonderful work. It shows us why the Harvey Awards are named for him.

See my earlier post on this book here.

The Art of Harvey Kurtzman, Part 1

Illustrator Dave Gibbons says when he and writer Alan Moore started to think about Watchmen, they agreed they wanted their super heroes to look like “Superduperman,” a comic-strip feature created back in 1953 for MAD magazine by Harvey Kurtzman and Wally Wood. (Sickly Clark Bent, assistant copy boy for the Daily Dirt, has an unrequited crush on Lois Pain, girl reporter. But he has no better luck as a costumed crime fighter. “So you’re Superduperman instead of Clark Bent! Big deal!” Lois proclaims after smacking him silly. “Yer still a creep!”)

That Gibbons and Moore picked a silly comic hero for their tragic outlaws isn’t that surprising. Everyone borrowed from Harvey Kurtzman or were inspired by his work, in one form or another. Just ask Robert Crumb, Gilbert Shelton, Terry Gilliam or Harry Shearer ….

Testimony to this can be found in The Art of Harvey Kurtzman: The Mad Genius of Comics, by Denis Kitchen and Paul Buhl, published this summer. It’s the kind of biography Kurtzman deserves — it’s as much picture book as narrative. It includes the abovementioned “Superduperman” feature along with lots of other art and writing samples from MAD magazine, plus pages from Kurtzman’s other well-known creation, “Little Annie Fanny,” which ran in Playboy from 1962 to 1988.

But even better: This book shows his early work from the 1940s, plus examples from Frontline Combat and Two-Fisted Tales, war-themed comic books for EC Comics that eschewed the then-standard gung-ho heroics for stark realism and often frightened protagonists.

To be continued …