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.

Your Homework For Today

Wednesday Apllied Comics Day.

When I started this blog I got quite a name by showing every kind of comic and cartoon strip journalism I could find. Most of them related to Harvey Kurtzman, who used the idea of having a comc strip artist do an illustrated report for himself and others in the late fifties and early sixties. One of those was by Paul Coker for Help. Not soon after that Paul Coker di one by himself for Car & Driver magazine. I don't know if he was some sort of regular contributor for them (I think he was a car enthousiast) s there may be more out there...

In the same issue there also is an illustration by Arnold Roth, another Kurtzman alumnea. Roth worked for al sorts of magazine in the sixties and seventies. Here we see him ding his best Ronald Searle impression for a British auto show.

You're In The Picture Now

Monday Cartoon Day

In the late seventies and early eighties I was working for the slick Dutch fanzine Striprofiel (for which I had the honor to interview Jeff Jones, Will Eisner, Denis Kitchen, Jean Giread, Mike Mignola and John Byrne, among others). One of our contributors was Geraard Leever, a young artists, who at that point was still an amateur. He showed us the illustrated diary he had kep while he was in (Compulsory) Service in the army. I suggested he turn them into a 'reportage' like the ones I had seen from Help. For the text he turned to one of his army buddies, who had gone on to become a columnist in a nationally syndicated newspaper. It turned out pretty good.



After that, we tried to send them on a couple more assignments, but Gerard never felt at ease with the journalistic aspect of it. He would rather draw about his own experiences. So he did. He turned Gleever's Dagboek (Gleevers Diary, as we had started calling it) into a personal feature, in which he reported on his life, his youth, his health, his career and his tastes. He has kept it up till this day until he finally had enough to compile them into one big book. For a long time he was the only artist doing something like that in Holland (and probably in the world) and he was jujstly proud of that. You can see more of the book (in Dutch) if you use the link I have added. Since then he has gone on to become a respected comic book artist here in Holland. His biggest claim to fame is Oktoknopie, a kids gag strip about a boy and his talking toy (which he came up with around the same time as Calvin and Hobbes started to appear, but it really was a case of similar minds...) On the site, you'll also find one book that's in English, an illustrated kids book for a series of easy reading books about a town ful of classic monsters.

So here is some more of his cartoon journalism work. First a page of sketches from his notebook.



Secondly, one of the twopagers he produced (most of these were four pages) about one of his favorite movies.. It's A Wonderful Life. Enjoy.

Heavy Lifting

Monday Cartoon Day.

Harvey Kurtzman tried to have as many cartoon reports as possible in Help. Apart from the ones I have shown, he had Jack Davis go to a ballgame, sent Arnold Roth to Moscow and Paul Coker went to a Broadway show as well as Cuba. Robert Crumb visited one or two Eastern European countries as wlel, but I am not sure if those pieces were assignments. When everything else failed, Kurtzman gave himself an assignment. He went to the filming of one of movie version of one of the most important television plays of the early sixties, Rod Serling's Requiem For A Heavyweight with mega-stars of that time Jackie Gleason, Mickey Rooney and Antony Quinn.

It's from Help Vol 2, No. 7, one of the few issues I have double:







His version of the genre was far less gag-based and more of a continuous story as would have been seen in Mad, Trump of Humbug. If you want to know how he did it and how he certainly didn't cut any corners, have a look at his preparation sketches. This and more you can find at: http://kurtzman.typepad.com/photos/kurtzman/index.html. The Requiem pages are on the second index page.

These are courtesy of the The Kurtzman Collection a recent addition to the internet. This wonderful site gives an overview of Kurtzman's career, using many unseen sketches and images from the Kurtzman Estate. As it says on that site, all images used there (an reused here) arte The Kurtzman Etstate. I hope they will get that coffeetaqble book going. And I hope they will get in tough with Glen Bray who has more of this type of stuff.