Mad's Maddest Paul

Sunday Repeat Opportunities.

One of the most respected artists working for Mad was Paul Coker. His funny yet charming style helped make many of Mad's most sarcastic pieces become palateble. Similarely, Mad's writers helpen Coker maintain his edge, where some of his other work (for Hallmark or television cartoon design) was simply only charming. But he had that edge himself as well, as you can see from some of the pieces he did outside of Mad. I collected all of the pieces I have shown here before into this one post. The reason was I came across on of his page filling cartoons in Esquire. I don't think it is his only one, but I never saw any others. It is written by his long time collaborator Phil Hahn.

Some of Coker's earliest and most remarkable work were the two reportages he did for Harvey Kurtzman's. For his Warren magazine Help #6, Kurtzman sent Paul Coker on an assignment to Cuba. The result is not that different from the pieces Sol Silverstein was doing for Playboy. But it was the first of many such pieces of cartoon journalism in Help, which impressed me a lot when I saw them first. Paul Coker's remarkable style had been fixed since the start of his career as a cartoonist. In fact, he is still going trong with regular contributions to Mad.









For Help #9 Harvey Kurtzman sent his staffer Gloria Steinem to a New York Women only Turkish Bath (apparently before they became a favorite spot for homosexuals and Bette Midler). She was accompanied by a female cartoonist I have not seen before or ever since. Remember, this was before Steinem went undercover to a Playboy Club as a Bunny and made a name for herself. In fact, it probably is a long forgotten inspiration for that move.







I do not have any of the greeting cards Coker did from his earliest days on, though I have seen them here and there. Here are a bunch of commercial cards Coker did for the York Machinery and Supply Company. The fifth is by a different artist who took over.

In 1967 Coker did a series of ads for the Raid anti-roach company. I am guessing there are more.

Finally Coker and Hahn managed to sell a newspaper strip in 1970. Unfortunately Lancelot was too mysogynistic, even for it's time.

One of the oddest places to find another journalistic piece would be this, an issue of Car & Driver from 1963. I don't know if he was a regular contributor and suggested it himself or if the editor simply was a Mad fan.

Send In The Comic Artists

Saturday Leftover Day.

Before John Cullen Murphy drew the fifties boxing strip Big Ben Bolt, he was mainly active as a sports illustrator for various magazines. One of his most important clients was Collier's, but I have also seen his work in Boy's Life and other places. This piece, taken from the relatively unknown man's digest 21, is a bit different. For the larger magazines he usually illustrated articles and short stories by others, often not only in line but also in full color. This piece reads as if it is put together by Murphy himself and looks like an early example of comics journalism - very similar to the articles Harvey Kurtzman had some of his artists *such as Paul Coker, Jack Davis and Robert crumb) do for the satirical Help! magazine in the early sixties. A magazine that Joe Sacco knew about when he did his groundbreaking books on Gaza and Bosnia.

Comic And Not So Comic Journalism

Wednesday Educational Day.

Here are some selected pieces from Associated Press in the late thirties and early forties. I guess, these would come as part of the package you got when you subscribed to AP's news service. They had a staff of artists and photographs that provided visuals for their stories or sometime even pure visual bits. From this pool of talent came a lot of the early realitstic artists, such as Al Capp, Milt Caniff, Noel Sickles, Mel Graff, Hank Barrow and George Wunder.