“The past grimly waited for me at home.”
“Love does not choose between uniforms.”
“Your world is bright with promise. Mine still smolders from dark hatreds.”

One thing KIrby almost never does in his writing (and there is a single example in the Oleck story) is use vertical captions adjacent to panels. Kirby’s captions are almost always at the top of panels. When there are exceptions “Everybody Want’s My Girl” it may be a story where Kirby is working from a script.
Joe Simon made frequent use of vertical captions in stories he wrote. penciled and inked, like the Vagabond Prince, or Duke of Broadway stories. Other S&K studio writers also frequently employed vertical captions (see the Eclipse book REAL LOVE and check “Merciless” or “Baby Doll.”

Here is some information about Kirby’s role at the S&K studio.

Jim Amash interviewed Jack Katz (Alter-Ego #92).

Katz on Kirby and Simon at Timely:
“Jack would work at his own desk there and Joe would come in during the morning and subtly stare at us. Jack would go for lunch, and when he came back Joe would leave for the day.”

Katz on Kirby at Timely:
You know how I learned to ink? Jack sat me down one day, He said, “This is what you do.” He took one of my drawings, and he inked it with a brush. I’d never seen inking that good in my life. I said, “Jack if you could ink so good, why do you let—?” He said, “I don’t have the time.”
He said, “This is what I want you to do. You apply the blacks like this. This is this is what you do with your camera angle to make the background stand out. Jack would fill in all kinds of black areas in the background. As an inker, I don’t think there could have been anybody better if he had done his own stuff himself.

Katz on Kirby as S&K art director in the late ’40s early ’50s:
Jack would get in early, he was always there before I came in. He left late. Jack wrote as he drew, he also worked from scripts, but he would use them as a template.

Katz on Kirby and Meskin:
“Jack represented a boss who was handling a very unusual art form. He was very much in command. The only one who could say stupid things to him was Mort Meskin. Mort had a window seat. He’d say, “Get up!, Get up!” and a girl would be walking around in a bathing suit. And Jack would say, “Would you sit the Fuck down.” This happened almost every day.
One day Mort brought in some pornographic toys, Queen-sized fake breasts. He shows them to Kirby. Jack says, “What are you doing?” Mort puts the breasts on the floor and starts jumping up and down on them. Jack told him to stop, and get back to work. ”

Amash also interviewed S&K studio writers Walter Geier and Kim Aamodt.

Kim Aamodt: I really sweated out plots, unlike Jack Kirby. Jack just ignited and came out with ideas, and Joe’d just kind of nod his head in agreement. Jack’s face looked so energized when he was plotting that it seemed as if sparks were flying off him.Joe was on the ground, and Jack was on cloud nine. Jack was more of the artist type; he had great instincts.

Walter Geier: Jack Kirby was great about that; he always came up with the plots. Jack had a fertile mind. Joe used to sit there when the writers came in for conferences. They sat there and made up the plots for the writers. Jack did most of that. Joe would say something once in a while, but Jack was the idea man. Joe didn’t talk much. He could come up with decent plots, but it was usually very sketchy stuff. A lot of times Joe would say, ” Awww…you figure out the ending.” Jack would give me the ending, because he was good at figuring out stories. It was not hard to work with Jack. They were Jack’s plots. I just supplied the dialogue.

honestly i hate seeing that shit it pisses me off.

http://marvelmasterworksfansite.yuku.com/reply/505627/Young-Romance–Best–Simon-Kirby-s-1940s-50s-Romance-Comics#reply-505627

http://forums.comicbookresources.com/showthread.php?t=398315

Hey Thurber, when did you intern for the Dame? Around what years?

- Patrick

Thurber, you’re a genius.

Growing up in New York in the ’60s, I — a goy — assimilated a lot of yiddishisms without being aware of it; ‘Schmuck”, “putz”, “ganef”, “like a hole in the head I need that”, and so on. But then, it was said in those days that if you lived in NY long enough, your foreskin (you should only pardon the expression) would fall off.

It’s sad that in Israel, Yiddish was (until recently) actively discouraged in favor of Hebrew.

BTW, some Yiddish expressions have also entered popular French, although transliterated differently — “schmuck” becomes “chnoque”; However, most French Jews were of Sephardic rather than Ashkenazi stock, so were more apt to speak Ladino than Yiddish.

No horror comics of this sort exist in Japan as far as I know . . . but am sure something will come to mind as soon as I push “post comment.”

My question was the relevance of the Roy Thomas quote to the specific topic of 70s horror comics, and the status of “caricature” in the work Craig introduced in his essay and the Warren comics linked early on. Obviously, forms of stereotypical facial deformation is happening in a work like “Jennifer” to accentuate the horror the male character is feeling. In “Cold Cuts,” however, the effects of suspense are achieved through different means, forms of abstraction that are not caricature, like the use of the snow setting — vast areas of white — to create a world in which identities are unclear and bearings are slipping — which to me is really smart . . . it’s like flipping the old “danger lurks in the shadows” to show that white and negative space can create a much more direct and fresher effect.

For something like “Black Orchid,” I feel like it might be useful to differentiate between caricature and stereotyping — these beautiful women who look just one like the other even if their personalities are opposite. The point of Craig’s reading was that we cannot read the differences of personality through their faces, which seems to me to argue against reading that work through caricature, since a basic principle of caricature is the legibility of personality (or social status, or moral character) through exaggerations of external physical features. That was one of the contributions of Freud, no? That nineteenth century physiognomical science was bunk, that you cannot tell criminals and degenerates and the insane from the shapes of their skulls. Not knowing the material well, I cannot say for sure, but maybe one can make an argument that horror comics for a long time depended on caricature for its meanings and effects, and thereby remained committed for artistic economy to a pre-Freudian worldview. Maybe those better Warren or Skywald works can be used to mark a turning point to something finally more “modern.”

First (and I’m surprised there wasn’t an earlier chorus of praise in this regard), I can’t imagine — the color-saturation problem, aside — a more delightfully and intelligently designed package than this one. It took me a long time to finally sit down, open it up, and really examine the book (part of the Christmas spoils), but when I did I saw one felicitous, pleasing, and/or smart design decision after another. Name some? The wonderful orange sherbet endpapers. The blue, then green, then later yellow top and bottom page “brush stroke” coloring. The decision to leave the illustrations accompanying the texts sans descriptions. The full bleed on the cover reprints. The perfectly imperfect, hand-drawn broken lines. The full stop of the double-sided color section indexes. The pale blue type within the story notes. The orange lining within the large “Donald Duck” lettering,and the little black-and-white Donald head (ha!) in the center of it all.

The layout designer was Tony Ong. Nice job, Tony!

(I can say that I wasn’t quite as happy with the actual cover design by Jacob Covey at first, but looking at the paucity of interior drawings that could’ve easily been transferred to a cover position, I started to warm to the dual top and bottom illustrations design he finally ended up with. And I love the spine.)

Second, as to the supposedly across-the-board abysmal coloring and printing of most, say, pre-Silver Age comics, what I’ve found is that the quality is all over the place, from title to title, from publisher to publisher, from year to year. Not too long ago I used ebay to make my way through a lot of affordable pre-Code horror, and the Ziff-Davis stuff was gorgeous on both fronts, the Fawcett as bad on both, the Harvey stuff intermittently positive then MUCH better all of a sudden… And so it went. The variability is just so extreme as to make any generalization, either pro or con, completely unreliable. And I think behind that variability is a story much more complicated than the simple one of “unpaid coolies” or “drones” that we’ve been telling each other for years.

Kael’s stuff never struck me as super-autobiographical..? Maybe I’m forgetting pieces, but she didn’t usually talk about her childhood watching films that I remember…. It seems like that comment may have been more metaphorical than to be taken quite literally…?

There’s certainly a fair bit of autobiographical music criticism. I really like Ellen Willis’.

There’s a ton of autobiographical comics criticism out there; whether it’s the most important or the best depends on who you ask, I suppose. Formalist criticism and historical criticism are also well-represented. Theory-based approaches probably less so.

The greatest autobiographical film criticism is James Baldwin’s “The Devil Finds Work.” Damn it.

To me the tone of that article didn’t sound “shocked” or incredulous, just grumblingly indignant — which is not an unreasonable reaction is it

I do think, though, that every example of criticism should be evaluated on its own merits, and not dismissed because it’s “fannish” or “autobiographical.” I teach Film History, and when I talk about the rise of the auteur-driven Art Cinema of the ‘50s and ‘60s (the “Golden Age” of Fellini, Bergman, Kurosawa, the French New Wave, etc.), we read academic, “professional” dissections of the Art Cinema (David Bordwell’s article defining the mode is one) but we also read Philip Lopate’s introductory essay to his collection TOTALLY, TENDERLY, TRAGICALLY, because it’s written in the first-person by someone whose life was changed by NYU film societies and visits to the Thalia theater. Bordwell tells us what Art Cinema is; Lopate tells us why it matters.

That said, I’m hard pressed to list autobiographical criticism of comics that run as deeply (for me) as Lopate’s essay. I like the way Bob Levin brings subjective elements into everything he writes, and I found Tom Spurgeon’s “Comics Made Me Fat” touching…other examples?

Incidentally, Ryan, if Scarlet Fever kills me, I’ll still post replies to this thread. What could be more appropriate to the spirit of EC/Warren/Skywald?

Yes, practically all of Warren’s and Skywald’s magazines have been scanned.

I’ll have to make sure I remember that one.

Allen Smith

As this book points out, the great John Garfield was also Jewish. He’s the one to be proudest of, far as I’m concerned!

I, too, found the slighting of Polonsky’s Tell Them Willie Boy Is Here to be utterly mystifying — and disappointing.

Matthew

http://home.comcast.net/~the.idea.orchard/Firstcommunion_picasso4by6.jpg
http://cache2.allpostersimages.com/p/LRG/21/2148/APGCD00Z/posters/picasso-pablo-figure-by-the-sea-c-1931.jpg

Diversity is always good.

It’s funny, in a way, because the Warren magazines in particular were grown from the same soil as the ’60s underground; the Archie Goodwin issues were direct continuations of the pre-Code genre style, specifically EC-derived horror comics and (for a short while) Kurtzmanian war comics. Truthfully, I find a lot of these issues boring, with the often lovely art carrying around slavish, off-the-shelf imitations of a style from years prior. Yet just as the undergrounds built up from EC’s influence — and indeed, how Warren itself intersected directly at times with the underground, be it through several underground artists’ appearances in Kurtzman’s own pre-Creepy Warren project Help!, or the horror line’s early adoption of Richard Corben, who himself was arguably part of a schism in the underground between the Greg Irons-ish genre-y guys and the more humor/satire-based confrontation of Zap and later Arcade and later Raw — the Warren magazines under DuBay and Jones developed into an odd, adventuresome scene for violent adventure serials and random acts of darkness informed by a horror genre heart; this was the true, active division between Warren and Skywald to me, as the latter pursued the grimy, lingering horror-mood, while Warren sought to become a darker counter-mainstream to comics at large. I know Dark Horse is going to start putting out serial-based collections of the Warren stuff soon, so maybe the understanding of them will shift a bit.

There was a lot of crap, though. There always is. I don’t think anyone was quite approaching the better horror movies of the time; one of the reasons Taboo started, if I’m remembering correctly, was to try to put the genre-in-comics on the level of other media formats, though when I think ‘horror’ comics I mostly see literary influences, like Clive Barker or the ‘splatterpunk’ wave of a while back (which is kind of still where publishers like Avatar are at, although there’re always the odd exception like Ennis’ & Burrows’ 303, which actually is a screaming political tract in the Thrillkill mold, if not nearly as compressed as Stenstrum would make it)…