Wanna see somethin' from a book that has greatly influenced my comedy style for almost fifty years (a nice trick when you're only seven)? It's my well-worn copy* (in fact, the cover's even missing, but I laminated the first page so it won't fall apart!) of Dr. Fegg's Nasty Book of Knowledge (Amazon ad), written by the two best Pythons, Terry Jones and Michael Palin. Ostensibly presented as an almanac of facts and history, it contains features like "Football: My Way, by the Supremes," "Parlour Games: Pass the Bengal Tiger," "Learn to Speak French in Four Minutes!," "The Famous Five Go Pillaging," "Europe on One Pound a Year," "I Fought the Mighty Anaconda and Lived!," "Dr. Fegg's Useless Page" ("This page can be scrumpled up and thrown away without damaging or interfering with the rest of the book"), and a couple of comic strips, one of which I'll show you now (and the other, probably next week!)
In the 1980s, during the last few years before the arrival of the VHS and Beta videocassettes, Marvel put out a lot of comics in the genre that would soon mostly killed off: the movie adpatation comic book. They ranged from the extraordinary (Dune and...um...surely some others I'll think of later) to the forgettable (Raiders of the Lost Ark, Dragonslayer, For Your Eyes Only, Blade Runner, Howard the Duck, Buckaroo Banzai, Annie, The Muppets Take Manhattan, 2010, Willow, Xanadu (really?), Dark Crystal, Sheena, Masters of the Universe, Pinocchio and the Emperor of the Night (huh.), House II...) A genre of comic that had worked pretty well in the 1950s and 60s for Dell and Gold Key (especially in their Walt Disney movie adaptations) became passé when you could see the movie again later whenever you wanted on chunky VHS. You could5 really see Marvel throwing everything against the wall, hoping for another Star Wars-sized hit.
Born on this day in 1919: the great comics and fine art illustrator Bernard Krigstein, best known by his usual signature B. Krigstein. One of the most lauded and acclaimed comics artists of the 1950s, epsecially for his work on EC Comics. Jorts the Cat, however, would be pleased to know that Krigstein was one of a group to attempt to form a major comics artists unions, "The Society of Comic Book Illustrators," in 1952. I'm pleased, too! Ahead of his time not only in skill but in social progress. It sadly ceased after a year, but while he got fewer assignments from Marvel/Atlas and DC/National because of his labor views, progressive-minded Bill Gaines at EC Comics gave him more work. His work was featured in booiks like Aces High, Mad, Vault of Horror, Impact, Incredible Science Fiction, Valor, Weird Science-Fantasy, and others.
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