Kids Are Funny (Or Are They)

Wednesday Illustration Day.

I love the work of Jerry Robinson. He was an extraordinairy inker, who helped build the succes of the early Batman books. He did solo stories about Alfred I think were great. As the inker of Mort Meskin he not only added depth and solidity to his work, but actually was the only artist able to present and contain Meskin's talent like no one else. Except maybe Meskin himself and then only sometimes. The solo work he did after that for Stan may seem a bit more pedestrian to our eyes since so many people learned form him thtough his nogh classes at teh New York School of Art and 'normalized' his innovations, but if we take a closer look we see that he was actually four or five years ahead of everyone.

In the fifties he did a newspaper strip, some work for Dell and drifted into illustration, before finding a new career as a political cartoonist. In the late sixties he started a new Sunday only feature in his cartoon style called True Classroom Fubs and Fluffs, illustrating 'true' misproniunciations by kids, sent in by the readers. I have to admit I never was a huge fan of this phase of his career because it seemed as if he was trowing away his talent for something trivial. Last year I got a whole stack of those strips and I have been scanning them for the last couple of months. Eventhough the strip is a lot better than I though graphically, textually it still is hard to read for me. Of all the pages I am showing here I finished only half. Somehow it doesn;t make me care enough to read all of it.

But at least it is up here now so you can look for yourself. I hope to show you the rest of the run as the weeks go by.