A Puzzling Period

 Sunday Surprise Day.

Four years ago I shared scans of a rare Harvey Kurtzman book. Kurtzman is best known for being the creator of Mad and doing Little Annie Fanny for PLayboy with Bill Elder. Fans will also know he did a remarkable line of war comics for EC and had a funny filler page in all of the Timely titles in the post war years called Hey Look!. In between Hey Look! and Mad he struggled. He had a partnership with Bill Elder and Carles Stern, did some work for Varsity, but mostly was looking around for new accounts. 

One of those included a company called Kunen, which produced children's puzzle books. Not vooks with puzzles, but books that were puzzled themselves. All of these books had thick double carton pakes and pieces your could take out (and sometimes switch for a nem effect). I don't know who originated this gimicky concept. It sounds like something Kurtzman would think of and he may have. I really should reread that part of Bill Schelly's excellent Kurtzman biography, But as far as I remember even Bill did not find out anything about that period I ddn't already know and Kurtzman himself was always quite tightlipped about it.

All in all Kurtzman did several of these books. Some he did with René Goscinny, a French/Argentinian jewish cartoonist who was staying in New York at that time and even shared or rented a desk at the socalled CharlesWlliamHarvey Agency. That is also where he met another French artist called Morris and started writing his already succesful comic strip Lucky Luke for the French-Belgian magazine Spirou. After a year or so he went back to France, started working with Albert Uderzo and evenually became famous as the writer and co-creator of Asterix and the editor and co-originator of the magazine Pilote.

Another artist who did some books for Kunen was Fred Ottenheimer. Not much is known about thos silly artist, except that he went to the same school als Kurtzman, Bill Elder and later Mad artist Al Jaffee. After doing a couple of books for Kunen, he did filler pages for various Fawcett comics (most of them unsigned and unidentified, although I am keeping a list) and became a publisher when he inherited his family's company. I don't know if he was part of the coterie of Kurtzman in the late forties (Al Jaffee wasn't), but he did become friends with Morris and shared an appartment or a studio with him for a short time (as well as publishing his one and only childrens book).

The one puzzle book I shared here (linked below) was done by Goscinny on his own. In my accompanying text I said I welcomed scans of the others. This week, I saw that a comment was added by Sue (I threw away the mail before noting her last name) offering just that. We exchanged information and she sent me the scans for one of Kurtzman's own books. I kindly let it go out to the world. Two down, four more to go.

Puzzle Collector

Saturday Leftover Day.

I have been researching The period that European artists Morris (Lucky Luke) and Jijé (Jerry Spring) stayed in New York, met Harvey Kurtzman and through him Morris met Goscinny (Asterix) who went on to write Lucky Luke for him. Goscinny also worked with Goscinny on children's books for Kunen, both together and seperately (although Kurtzman did many more). Here is the whole of Goscinny's solo book, which like all the others is a puzzle book. The reader could take out parts and put them in again. I don't know how popular they were, but all of the copies I have seen still had all of the pieces in. By the way, another artist/contemporary working for Kunen was Fred Ottenheimer, who had been to school with Kurtzman (though not the same year or class) and wold later do a lot of work for the Charlton Mad imitations Eh! and From Here To Insanity. He is included with a great four page television commercial parody in my book Behaving Madly.

Americo-European Research

Saturday Leftover Day.

I am member of a facebook group called Comics History Exchange. I don't know if it is a public group, I was invited (sometimes it pays to know people). I ran into a comic history thing hving to do with European artists moving to the US and finding work there. In the late forties three Belgian comic artists (who later on all became very famous with their creations for Spirou magazine) decided to move to the US because they were afraid that the Russians would come and take over Europe. Or they wanted to try their luck or broaden their horizons. Anyway, Jopeph Gillian (Jijé), André Franquin and Maurice de Bevere (Morris) made the trip, had some fun and decided to come back again. Only Maurice de Bevere returned to the US again, met up with a group of New York artists which included Harvey Kurtzman, the genius cartoonist who later invented Mad. I recently read his biography and found out that he says he drew some comics as well, never a complete job, only inking and sometimes pencilling (especially the western stories). Since he later went on to do the famous Lucky Luke series, that fits. Funny enough no one in Europe ever bothered to find out what he may or may not have drawn en no one in the US was familiar enough with his Euopea fame to look into it from that side. He did also do at least one children's book story, which was signed, so that is pretty well known.

In discussing this with the Facebook historians, Jim VandeBoncoeur Jr. told me that Denis Kitchen has looked into the children's book aspect and found out something more about that. I will try and get in touch with Denis (a Harvey Kurtzman expert, whom I interviwed years ago when he was still a cartoonist and Will Eisner's representative) and aske about that. I guess his interest in these children's books tems from the childrens books Harvey Kurtzman did four years earlier for a different publisher (one of which was in collaboration with René Goscinny, another French cartoonist in their circle, who went on to collaborate with Morris on Lucky Luke and create Asterix with Albert Uderzo).

He also mentoined that a French publisher had looked into the whole matter and found out that Jijé (Gillian) had in fact drawn and published a short romance story in DC's Romance Trail series. I kicked myself for not having seen that, but it turns out it's in the one issue of the six issue series I haven't got. Because it's so obvious it's by Jijé, even I would have seen it.

So here is that story, along with some samples of Jijé later western succes Jerry Spring...

But that's not all... there is still the questio of what Maurice de Bevere drew. Well, in the late forties Harvey Kurtzman shared his studio with a couple of artists, including René Goscinny, but also John Severin. Severin picked up a lot of western work from Prize for Prize Comics Western and got people from the studio to work with him. His main partner in all those stories was Bill Elder (who later did all those really funny stories for Mad and created Little Annie Fanny for Playboy wth Kurtzman). Elder inked Severin for years, up until the war stories tehy did for Kurtzman's war titles at EC. But in Prize Comics Western there were other combinations as well. Kurtzman himself inked a couple of Severin Stories and there are one or two that have dfferent hands on them as well. In fact, when Jim VandeBoncoeur discussed the list he had made with Severin himself there were two that were attributed to him that he had doubts about himself. Since we in Europe only know Morris for him funny work (although he did do some srieus illustration work in the midfifties) so we have nothing to compare it to, bt it seems that these two stories are in fact the prime candidtes for being pencilled by de Bevere - with inking by Bill Elder, which makes it similar enough to the Severin and Elder stories from that period to have them be mistaken for Severin's work.

It was only after that that I found a funny filler strip in DC's Romance Trails that could be by Morris as well...

If I Had A Mallet

Tuesday Comic Strip Day.

Pat Mallet is a French cartoonist, who is best known for his full page cartoons about 'little green men'. In the late sixties he was part of the same crowd that did funny stuff for Pilote Magazine Pilote was run by Asterix author René Goscinny, who had met Mad creator Harvey Kurtzman twenty years before and was responsible for bringing more and more Mad style humor to Pilote. Together with Gotlib, he did Les Dingodossiers, a series of satirical features that were sort of like 'statement and samples' articles of Al Feldstein's Mad of the sixties (although Kurtzman had done a couple of those for Varsity Magazine in the late forties - when we met and worked with Goscinny). Later, he would allow some of his contributors to do more topical stuff. But before the Paris 'revolution' of 1968 he was more interested in the more generally irreverant and silly. Mallet fitted right into that and did a large amount of tories, some of which featured his martian character. Like this sixpager, which also has the bonus of being one of those selfreferential comic stories I like.