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.

War Is Hell (But Necessary) 6

Chapter 6

Discussing yesterday's story. A great example of Chapman's qualities as a storyteller.

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"It's June in Korea... but don't expect pretty flowers! They can't find the sun... because the dead are in the way!" That's the start of the story called Battle Convoy in Battle #6. It is drawn by Russ Heath, who depicts the action with extreme realism.

The hero of this story is corparal Hank Stern, who is stuck being a truck driver when he want to be fighting at the front. When the narrator warns him that being at the front is not all it's cracked up to be, he looks straight at the reader and says: "Aw, shut-up! What are you butting in for?!"

Is it a coincidence that the hero's name, Stern, is also the name of Harvey Kurtzman's former studio mate Charlie Stern? Probably, but worth noting anyway.

The narrator doesn't shup up, though. He tells him about the horrors of the front line:

"Don't go shouting off your mouth like that, corporal Stern. Yelling that you want to be in combat doesn't mean that you are a brave man... it means you're foolish. While you are screaming to get up to the front, every G.I. up on the line is cursing the day he was sent into combat. And they have reason to curse... the Chinese have launched another of their vicious Jen Hai (human sea) attacks."

He then shows the attack while quoting Lord Tennyson, John Pierpont, General Sherman and William Shakespeare. 

"But you wouldn't know about all that, corperal Stern... because you are tucked away safely in your sack."

But Stern is a stubborn man. He wants to have a medal and will do anything to get it. When he is asked to join a convoy of trucks to deliver ammunition to the front, he takes first position. 

The convoy leaves. "And twenty trucks loaded with ammunition roll into the night..." 

Of course, the convoy gets attacked and it all goes wrong. 

Corperal Stern't truck is the only one to make it through. He will get his medal... but it wil have to be posthumously.

I Am Telling You One Last Time

Friday Comic Book Day.

Four years ago I showed a story from the early fifties horror magazine Mister Mystery #1, which many believe to have been done by Charles Stern, a former classmate of Harvey Kurtzman. The story is completely in the Kurtzman style and completely new, not cobbed together from swipes. Kurtzman had just been doing some artwork for the early EC horror ooks and just as this book seems to be an answer to the horror boom that EC started, this story seems to be the editors attempt to imitate that aspect of EC's succes. The story itself is so original and so much like the work of Kurtzman that some have proposed that Krtzman may have helped out his old friend Charlie Stern. My intrenet friend Michael T. Gilbert even adressed this in his pages in Alter Ego, showing not only this story but also the one after that in Mister Mystery #2, which looks to be by the same team. Sounds reasonable, doesn;t it?

Except that it isn't true. Or at least that is my opinion. In my previous post (predating the article in Alter Ego) I already stated this, but the whole idea of finding an unknown Kurtzman story based on the idea that he may have helped his old studio mate (yep, they shared a studio in the late forties) is too tempting.

So why am I so adement. Well, first of all, the story is not well drawn enough to be by Kurtzman and Kurtzman too much of a perfectionist to have helped out over someone elses pencils. He may have done so a couple of times in 1947 when he was out of a job and hadn't found his style yet, but in 1951 he was well underway at EC and becoming the perfectionist we all know and love. We are talkng about a man who not only sketched every panel of every story he wrote for every artist, he also refused to work with them if they didn't stick with his example, even if they were Alex Toth.

Also, the whole 'helping out a friend' idea is backwards. The story looks like Kurtzman's so it must be by Charlie Stern so Kurtzman could have helped him out? This sidesteps the fact that the story is not signed and that there is no evidence of Stern ever working for this company. He was doing his stuff at St. John at that time, in a complete different style, may I add. So when I first showed this story, I humble said that I could be wrong if the second story (which I hadn't seen at that time) would be signed by Stern. Heck, any story signed by Stern for Key Publications would be enough to at least leave a shimmer of a doubt. But now I have and can show the second story and it is not signed either. Even better, there is a third story as well, also unsigned and that undermines the 'helping out a friend' theory even further. I have a hard time believing Kurtzman would just ink someones pencils to help out a new publisher copy his style. Doing so twice makes it even harder to accept. But three times is impossible.

So who did these stories? In my previous post I pointed to the fact that the wife in the first story looks a lot like the funny work of Andru and Esposito later in life (Up Your Nose and stuff like that). They were invistors in this magazine and had their hand in almost every aspect of it. In issue #3 there is a story signed by Rose, which could be Mart Rosenthall (or at least that is how he signed his stories for Stan Le later in the fifties) who worked with Andru and Esposito in their own company MikeRoss as Thall. In that line, the prolific Andru used different inkers to create different styles. Also Andru and Esposito are known to have an EC fixation. Not only was Mr. Mystery a diect reaction to the horror books by EC, at MikeRoss they also produced a Mad imitation with many refences to the EC horror line and it's publisher Bill Gaines. Who, by the way refused ever to work with them again after that. The main point of course was the stylistic one and Andru and Esposito expert (and writer of their biography) Daniel Best.







The second 'Kurzman' story from Mister Mystery #2 does not have any direct visual link to the work of Andru and Esposito, though. It is clerly by te same team as the first one, but is it Andru? The pencilling is slightly less cartoony as well, could it be a different penciller? I don't think so. I think it stll is Andru, reverting a bit more to his own style. The introducing character is probably by him as well, but that could have been added later. The set-up of that page with the long image on the left is pure Andru, though.

The third (and last) story in this style has no signature either. So as far as I am concerned there is no evidence of Charles Stern doing this except years and years of fans willing it. The story has no typical Anru characters either, althugh there is the typical left hand side splash that Andru would use so much all through the fifties and there is the preference of vertical panels to horzontal ones that also marks his work. There even is a six vertical panel page, as we see in much of his work.

Anyway, I hope this ends the discussion for once and for all. For that to happen this post has to be seen, though. So please link to it, reproduce it on Facebook, whatever is necessary. As my final 'proff' I am including two newspaper strips Andru and Esposito tried. One from 1950 and a later one, both from Daniel Best's site.

Art Identification For Art Identification's Sake

Friday Comic Book Day.

John Severin and Bill Elder started their professional carer as penciller and inker at Prize. They are best known for their western stories in Prize Comics Western, taking over the book for a long time, before moving to EC (after which John Severin kept on doing the book on his own). Of course, they did other genres for Prize, too. Most notably a couple of romance stories for Smon and Kirby's Young Love and Young Romance. They also did a couple of crime stories for them. Most of their work was signed Severin and Elder, as is the first story here from Justice Traps The Guilty #14. The second one, from Justice Traps The Guilty #18, isn't though. Eventhough it is credited at the Grand Comicbook Database to John Severin with a possible Bill Elder ink credit, I see more of Elder than Severin here. I won't go as far as saying that it is penclled by Elder (tehre are some traces of Severin's style), but it's pretty damn close to me.

From that same issue of JTTG (as the collectors lovingly call it) is another question mark. Master art spotter Jim Vandeboncieur Jr. has notified the GCD that he thinks it might be a collaboration between John Sverin, Bill Elder and Harvey Kurtzman. If o, that is a great find, because new art jobs by Kurtzman are rare to find. And I think he is right. I too see the hand of Kurtzman and Elder on the inking at least. But I don't see John Severin and suspect a different penciller altogether. Unfortunately, this seems to be the infamous long figure penciller I have failed to recognize in many stories around this time (although I am pretty sure he was often inked by Leonard Starr). There is some resemblance to the pencils of Severin, but anything that he pencils look so undoubtably like his work that this doesn't fit. Could it have been another compatriot of theirs, Charlie Stern?