Please Sir, Can We Have Some More?

Monday Cartoon Day.

I always found the cartoons by Rowland Wilson te be some of the most interesting in Playboy. Maybe because he didn't always depend on a pretty (naked) girtl to make his gags. Of course, the gorgeous designs also helped. I was happy to find out he was also a regular contributor to Esquire. Like Gaham Wilson, Paul Coker, Harvey Kurtzman, Howie Schneider and Dutch artist Yrrah. If those magazines weren't so happy I would just get all of them between 1956 and 1966.

Howie Schneider, Esq.

Monday Cartoon Day.

Followers of my blog will know I am a big fan of the strips of Howie Schneider. His most famous one, Eek & Meek was a lovely mix of slapstick and philosophy. His later strip about penioners was silly and sarcastic and P.T. Bimbo's circus was a masterwork of cartooning. In the early sixties he did page filling cartoons for Esquire and they do not yet show the marks of his brilliance, But they are nice and large and rarely seen.

Nootracs

Monday Cartoon Day.

I have been going though some of my older issues of Esquire, admiring the full page gags they used to have in the fifties and early sixties. I guess, this is what Playboy is going to look like after announcing they will stop doing full nudity. Anyway, I came across a couple of great black and white cartoons by the Dutch artist Yrrah (which is Harry backwards). Even over here, he is sort of forgotten, but his angry sarcasm is sorely missed.

Stellar!

Monday cartoon Day.

I have contracted a nasty virus, so I am taking the easy route today. Here's another example of Kurtzman's cartoon journalism for Equire. I have no time or energy to look for the exact date, maybe that one of my visitor's who has Glen Bray's Kurtzman Guide can look it uo for me.

More Kurtzmania

Monday cartoon Day.

Continuing my Monday look at cartoon journalism.

Not long after doing the piece for The TV Guide Kurtzman did a couple of similar job for Esquire magazine. For the first one he went to the set of a James Cagney movie in Ireland. The style of this article is all Kurtzman' own. No one did these kind of reports before or after him. In hi later years on Little Annie Fanny he was most proud of his achievements in the use of color. Here we see him excel in that area for the first time. Esquire was a huge magazine, so I have split the scans in two. The first page was done in green and black and white. To make this remarkable piece of art more readable I have reversed the colors on that page. The original version is visible at the start of this piece.