Michael Sporn Animation – Splog

- Bill Peckmann chooses one of my favorite artists to end the comic strip posts for 2012. Dick Moore’s is a champion to me, and his work on the Mickey Mouse strips is wonderful.
I, personally, like the way he draws Goofy. But this is Bill’s entry, so here he takes over the post:

I’ve always been a fan of Dick Moores’ Disney comic art work, especially the two Mickey Mouse comic books that I have, (we’ve posted one already) if he did more than these two, I’m not aware of them. And if he only did these two, wow, that is really our loss. He had a great understanding of the Mick and the Goof characters.

His combination of excellent story telling and outstanding art makes you wonder what he could have done with Mickey and Goofy, if he would have had the same lengthy run with them that he had with his super successful Gasoline Alley comic strip.

The magazine cover

Here from 1952 is Dick Moores’ “Mickey Mouse and
the Wonderful Whizzex” Dell comic book.

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The end of the story, but…

…I thought it would be fun to line up these two panels from
Moores’ 1936 comic strip “Jim Hardy” next to the following panel
from “Wonderful Whizzex” done sixteen years later.

I’ve received a number of emails of collections of Christmas cards done by various artists. These are usually entertaining. However, I’ve found a number of my cards among quite a few of these groups, and I find that a bit awkward. I never quite sent them expecting they’d be published in any way, but I’m certainly going to roll with the punches. I’m not sure everything I post is designed to be published, either.

I did publish pages of a book which had posted one of my cards, and I did have some qualms about reposting those pages. Since one of them was mine, I figured that relieved any guilt I was feeling. So much art just wouldn’t be seen if it weren’t put on blogs like mine, so I justify it.

The image above came from an animated card I didn’t finish. It was a little dance Santa does as he eats an ice cream pop. It ends with a burst of snow spelling out the “Merry Christmas” message. I spent about . . . I don’t know. I spent a lot of time animating and coloring , and I still had about 15 seconds of art to finish it. But I missed the deadline. I would have had to kill myself and still probably miss getting it out ON Christmas Day. Absurd.

The real problem was that I hated the work that I’d done. It wasn’t something I was really proud of. There were too many distractions and I loved doing it on a day to day basis, but I’d forgotten to watch the big picture. Put it all together, and it didn’t need to go public. So, I apologize. No Christmas Card this year.

To all those that haven’t received anything from me, which means anyone reading this Splog, please accept my apologies and please, Have yourself a Merry and Big Christmas.

- From Bill Peckman:

Here are some Holiday and Christmas cheer cards from over the years, done by some of our favorite pen and brush men.

First through the mail slot is Jack Davis.

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(Click any image to enlarge.)

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The following are Harvey Kurtzman‘s cards:

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And now from the gifted hand of Arnold Roth.

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A terrific threesome from Wally Tripp!

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Thanks to Suzanne Wilson for these Christmas chuckles from Rowland Wilson.

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- Continuing with a great wallop of Christmas from the vast collection of Bill Peckmann, he sends along another Carl Barks gem. A Christmas for Shacktown glows off the page, and I’m pleased as punch to post it here. Bill’s introduction:

What happens when you take Carl Barks at the height of his powers and combine him with that potent, powerful time of the year, Christmas? Why you get, ‘A Christmas for Shacktown’, that’s what!

The magazine cover

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The End

The original Dell Donald Duck ‘…Shacktown’ comic book
hit the newsstands for Christmas of 1951. The story we
just posted was from a Gladstone Comics reprinted and
re-colored some years later. This editorial essay by noted
Carl Barks historian, Geoffrey Blum, was also in the Gladstone issue.

Thanks again, Bill.

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- We gave a little tease of this last week. Straight from the hot scanner of Bill Peckmann comes “Humbug” for Christmas joy. Here’s Bill:

Next in our Holiday helpings is a 1958 HUMBUG magazine’s ‘Christmas Issue’ by Harvey Kurtzman and his coconspirators. Fortunately for us, they are knee deep in shoveling out their unique form of tom foolery for everyone to enjoy in 2012!

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The cover was done by Jack Davis.

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This page was done by Bill Elder.

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These two pages are obviously by the inimitable Bob Blechman.

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A piece by Al Jaffee, who went on to become
one of Mad magazine’s favorites.

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This three page spread does not have
a Christmas theme but it does have
Harvey’s ever lovin’ lay outs with
Jack Davis at his brush and pen best!

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A tour de force two color centerfold spread by Al Jaffe.

A double page spread by Arnold Roth.

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‘A Christmas Carol’, art by Arnold Roth.

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While in a holiday mode, we will segue from a 1958 Humbug ‘Christmas Carol’ party
to a birthday party. It’s Harvey Kurtzman’s 58th birthday which was celebrated at
Harvey’s house in Mt. Vernon, NY, with family and friends in 1982. (Sorry about
the quality of the snapshots, they were taken with an old Kodak Instamatic camera.)

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Appearing in the photo L. to R. are Al Jaffee, Harvey Kurtzman, Bill Elder (kneeling),
Harry Chester (Harvey’s long time production manager and longer time friend),
Arnold Roth and a partially hidden and mischievous Jack Davis.

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The HUMBUG crew with their wives.

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Mr. and Mrs. Will Eisner and Harvey.

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Dena and Jack Davis.

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Harvey and his wife Adelle with daughters, Elizabeth, Nellie and Meredith.

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Many thanks to Bill Peckmann for sharing this material with us.

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Having begun last week with an exceptional post, courtesy of Bill Peckmann, on Bernard Krigstein, we can only try to do another one. We certainly can’t top any of his artwork.
(Go here to read that past post.)

So here, again thanks to Mr. Peckmann, more great art. Bill takes over the writing from here on out.

With his ground breaking, graphic, illustrative comic book pages, Bernard Krigstein did some of the best EC Comics art ever.
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He excelled in their genre of crime comics…

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…their line of horror comics…

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…and their science-fiction titles.

But Bernie also did two stories for Harvey Kurtzman’s MAD comic book and a few illustrations for Harvey’s early MAD magazine. Here is all of Krigstein’s art work for MAD.

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Starting with MAD #12, June 1954, is Kurtzman’s and Krigstein’s 7 page
movie spoof titled “From Eternity Back to Here”.

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Here from MAD comic book #17, Nov. 1954,
is “Bringing Back Father”, a comic strip send up
done by using the talents of Harvey Kurtzman,
Bill Elder and Bernard Krigstein!

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For the first issue of Kurtzman’s MAD magazine, # 24, July 1955,
Krigstein did two illustrations to accompany a story done with text.

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Here from MAD magazine # 26, Nov. 1955, are a few story illustrations by Krigstein.
It would be the last time that he and Harvey Kurtzman collaborated.

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Postnote from Bill:
For those readers who are coming upon Bernie Krigstein for the first time and like him, there are still two very worthy books available on him through Amazon. Both are authored by Greg Sadowski, Vol. 1 is a bio, it’s an excellent bio, especially his early life, with many illo’s, both are out of print but not cost prohibitive.
Take a look, here.

Years before Dick Moores got near the smell of Gasoline Alley, he had a bulging career at Disney’s doing books. Long before he ever thought of drawing Walt or Skeezix, he was a master of the Mouse. Bill Peckmann has sent me Goofy as the “Mechanical Wizard”, and I’ve rushed to put it together so I could read it. Here’s Bill’s opening salvo:

Continuing with the posting of Dick Moores ‘Disney’ career, we have here one of the classic Mickey Mouse comic book stories of the early 1950′s. It’s ‘Goofy’s Mechanical Wizard’, written and drawn by Dick, the story gives us a little glimpse of what will be in store for us once he was to take over the complete reins of the ‘Gasoline Alley’ comic strip, approximately a decade and half in the future. Surprisingly, here in his Mickey Mouse stories, there are no famous, rickety, ‘Gasoline Alley’ type bridges or catwalks. They would come later, but they would have been perfect for the hi-jinks of Mickey and especially, Goofy, with that in mind, Moores’ two MM stories would have made very enjoyable animated shorts.

Here then, is the cover and story of ‘Goofy’s Mechanical Wizard’.

The book’s Cover

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Inner covers of the magazine

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All three of these gags were written by Moores.

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Back Cover

And coming to a future Splog from Dick Moores:

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- Recently, on this Splog, we saw Dick Moores, who would eventually replace Frank King as the artist behind Gasoline Alley, as the artist behind the beautiful comic books featuring Mickey Mouse. Bill Peckmann continues with the Disney artist, Moores, as he gives us Lambert the Sheepish Lion, Bill Peet’s tale.

But first we saw an early strip drawn by Moores, “Jim Hardy”. Bill Peckmann is here to present some of the Moores history:

When Dick Moores was assisting Chester Gould on his ‘Dick Tracy’ strip in the 1930′s, his big dream was to eventually have a daily strip of his own. In 1936, he was finally able to fulfill that wish with the comic strip ‘Jim Hardy’. It lasted from 1936 to 1942. He left ‘Jim’ to join the ranks of the Disney comic strip dept. in ’42.

In this 1977 Hyperion Press’ book of reprints we get to read Dick’s version of how the strip came about (and what a sweet read it is) and also included are the first 21 dailies of the strip.

The cover page of this Hyperion Press collection of strips.

The back cover of the book.

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Thanks to Germund Von Wowern we have an original ‘Jim Hardy’ strip from the early 1940′s. Beautiful ink work! (Sorry about the rubber cement stains in the word balloons, those are left over from re lettered foreign language versions of the strip.)

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Here, I’ve broken the original strip into two parts
so that we can see it fully enlarged.

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In this 1953 story Dick Moores had a great time adapting the Disney short ‘Lambert, the Sheepish Lion’ to the pages of a comic book. The more I look at the art, the more I start to get the feeling, that in Dick, the cartoonist, there was always an illustrator trying to get out. Some of these panels would have made pretty good page illustrations. (Which makes one wonder and dream of what a comic book page would have looked like if it had been done by the one and only Bill Peet!?!)

The comic book cover which contained Lambert.

The back cover

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In Part 2 we’ll continue celebrating the art of Dick Moores and the release of Library of American Comics’ “Dick Moores’ Gasoline Alley”!

- Tom Hachtman, who you may remember is the friend who does Gertrude’s Follies and sometimes contributes to this Splog, (see this post about that) and his wife, Joey Hachtman, who you’ll remember has a business painting murals on the big houses at the Jersey Shore. (See this post as an example.) That’s where they live, in a house at the Jersey Shore. Point Pleasant is just a little bit of paradise with one of the rowdiest boardwalks at the shore. It’s a fun place, at least when the weather’s warm enough.

Well, Tom took some pictures. Sandy visited the shore a few weeks back, and things have been a bit different. They still don’t have heat or electric. So here’s the first of some photos of their back yard.

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Some of the boardwalk on Atlantic Avenue.

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A bench from the boardwalk.

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Boardwalk booth.

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Copters all day long.

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Our house with the peak – looking west on Forman Avenue.

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Our street, after Sandy, looking West.

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White fence shows high water mark.

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No parking today.
A parking pay station.

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Northern NJ clean-up crew – did the basement.

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Seton Hall’s Sigma Pi boys – cleaned out the garage.
(They found a possum playing dead convincingly.)

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Soggy collectibles.

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Myrna and Joey on the porch.

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No mini-golf today

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Kitty and Olive stop by visiting Joey (right)

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Debris in Rick’s driveway.

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Our house after some housecleaning.

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Across the street – high water mark on white fence.

And of course, turning to stored artwork that the family did over the many years, things weren’t so good.

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Here’s Tom going through some of the debris
to find anything that can be saved.

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Here are some of the comics that Joey had done cartoons for.
It’s doubtful that the issues can be replaced.

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More of those comics. Do you hold onto them?

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Here are some of the many cartoons she did for Screw Magazine.
Gone.

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A cover for New York Magazine
that Tom had saved.
It was done by Bob Grossman a few years ago.

- Last week we began this post. Harvey Eisenberg took success in doing the Tom and Jerry comic books for many years, but he began with Mickey Mouse. We began posting the great story, Mickey and the Beanstalk, last week, and here is the finish. Bill Peckmann has been doing much of the heavy loading by scanning and sending the material on to me. Here’s Bill’s comments on the piece:

‘Mickey…’ was a very fortunate pairing of cartoonist and story, it’s hard to picture anyone else doing a better job of adapting that movie to the comic book page than Harvey Eisenberg. There’s some really good stuff going on in these pages, the work was done 65 years ago and doesn’t seem dated at all.

Here’s a reproduction of the original
Dell comic book cover for
‘Mickey and the Beanstalk’ from 1947.

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It is now 1953, six years after Harvey Eisenberg did ‘the Beanstalk’ story, he did this story for ‘Silly Symphonies’ no. 2, it’s titled ‘Peculiar Penguins. It’s beautifully done, he’s encroaching on Walt Kelly territory, with his characters, posing, spotting blacks and oh, that lovely lettering!

The “Penguins” front cover

The back cover of this issue.

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- Here’s a gem of a comic story/adaptation drawn by Harvey Eisenberg for Silly Symphony Comics. Bill Peckmann scanned and sent the book, and I am enormously grateful. Here’s the magazine and bill’s comments:

As a kid reading Dell Funny Animal Comics there were a number of ‘good guys’ cartoonists who one always looked forward to seeing. Harvey Eisenberg (of course we didn’t know his name then, just like Barks) was always near the top of this ‘good guys’ list. He was sometimes called the Carl Barks of ‘Tom and Jerry’.

Harvey Eisenberg‘s ‘Mickey and the Beanstalk’ first ran in 1947. This here is a reprint from 1953 which was in ‘Silly Symphonies’ no. 3, 25 cents comic book. If you think about how daunting it would be to bring a Disney movie to the comic book page, all I can say is that Mr. Eisenberg did an excellent job.

Here are the front and back covers of the comic book. They were penciled by Paul (”Buck O’Rue”) Murry and the finished art was done by Donald T. MacLaughlin (see comments). As a kid I was always a sucker for these Disney illustrated/painted covers, and still am.

Front Cover

Back Cover

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To be continued, on Friday, Oh migosh !