Showing posts with label Rod Serling. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Rod Serling. Show all posts

Wednesday, December 29, 2021

Short Story Wednesday: THE SUPERNATURAL READER edited by Lucy and Groff Conklin (Lippincott 1953); ROD SERLING'S DEVILS AND DEMONS edited by Gordon R. Dickson (Bantam 1967)



The Supernatural Reader 
edited by Lucy & Groff Conklin
(Philadelphia: Lippincott, 1953, $3.95, 349pp, hc)

Rod Serling’s Devils and Demons  
ghost-edited by Gordon R. Dickson 
(Bantam, Feb ’67, 212pp, pb) 
    • vii · Introduction · Rod Serling · in
    • 1 · The Montavarde Camera · Avram Davidson · ss F&SF May 1959
    • 14 · The Coach · Violet Hunt · ss The English Review Mar 1909
    • 31 · Adapted · Carol Emshwiller · ss F&SF May 1961
    • 40 · Death Cannot Wither · Judith Merril · nv F&SF Feb 1959
    • 61 · The Story of the Goblins Who Stole a Sexton · Charles Dickens · ss The Posthumous Papers of the Pickwick Club Jan 1837
    • 72 · Pollock and the Porroh Man · H. G. Wells · ss New Budget May 23 1895
    • 87 · Stars, Won’t You Hide Me? · Ben Bova · ss Worlds of Tomorrow Jan 1966
    • 101 · The Bottle Imp · Robert Louis Stevenson · nv New York Herald Feb 8-Mar 1 1891
    • 129 · The Adventure of the German Student · Washington Irving · ss Tales of a Traveller, John Murray 1824
    • 135 · The Four-Fifteen Express · Amelia B. Edwards · nv Routledge’s Christmas Annual, 1867  1866
    • 160 · The Blue Sphere · Theodore Dreiser · ss The Smart Set Dec 1914
    • 177 · The Bisara of Pooree · Rudyard Kipling · ss The Civil and Military Gazette Mar 4 1887
    • 182 · A Time to Keep · Kate Wilhelm · ss F&SF Jan 1962
    • 197 · Brother Coelestin · Jaroslav Vrchlický  (as by Emil Frida)  · ss  Lumír Jan 20 1878 (trans./ed. Edna Worthley Underwood, from"Flétna", in Short Stories from the Balkans, Marshall Jones Co., 1919)

The 1966 paperback edition of the Conklins' anthology, sharing rack space with the 1967 Dickson/ "Serling" volume (and seeing at least four printings over the next several years)...the Collier pb, with more pages (and twice as many stories) on better paper, would set you back 95c, while the Bantam volume was 60c (by the 11th printing in the early '70s, the price would rise to 75c). I have this edition of the Conklins' book (though I find the cover on the first Collier paperback, from 1962, the handsomest of the packages the book has sported). In the wake of the remarkable success of Ira Levin's Rosemary's Baby, the televised horror soap opera Dark Shadows catching fire, and a number of paperback houses discovering that tagging anything remotely relevant as a Gothic was a guaranteed selling-strategy...perhaps that both books saw more reprints in 1967, and just after, than the Reader had had or either would have again is less surprising in retrospect than it might be (the Serling-branded book might've had a bump both from The Twilight Zone's entry into the syndicated television repeats market and from his initial-draft scripting the 1968 film Planet of the Apes). It doesn't hurt that they are both fine collections, even if the lack of concern for detail on Bantam's part (managing to refer Worlds of Tomorrow magazine in the publication credits as "The World of Tomorrow", for example), as well as featuring a slightly larger proportion of (theoretically) public domain stories (if good and mostly not overly familiar ones, in both volumes) than the scrupulously credited Conklins' volume might discourage a few potential readers.


Groff Conklin and Rod Serling were busy, productive, eventually frustrated people, who both chain-smoked their way into early graves. Both had been rather broad-scope in literary and narrative arts in their early careers, and eventually found themselves locked into working in fantastica, which they enjoyed but to some extent wished they didn't have to rely on, particularly as the rewards contracted. Conklin, who as a young man contributed to Poetry magazine, began his anthology-editing career with volumes drawn from The Smart Set and The New Republic, and wrote benchmark guides to home repair which would remain in print for decades, was 63 when he died of emphysema in 1968; Serling, a playwright who began his career in radio, was at least as widely-known for his teleplays Patterns and Requiem for a Heavyweight (and hassles with sponsors and censors) at the height of his career as he was for creating The Twilight Zone and its offshoots; and who found himself as prominent as a voice-over man and narrator as as a writer at the end of his career, was 50 when the third heart attack in a brief period, while he was on the table for open-heart surgery to repair damage from his second, essentially killed him in 1975. Conklin's wife and co-editor on The Supernatural Reader, Lucy Conklin, had died the year after the first edition was published, in 1954, and her husband added a note to reprints of the book stating that she had fully collaborated on the selections and the introduction with him; I have to wonder why her name is missing from the later editions otherwise. Presumably as lazy a marketing strategy as having Gordon Dickson, a talented writer and occasional editor, ghost the "Serling" book (he had also previously ghost-edited Rod Serling's Triple W: Witches, Warlocks and Werewolves for publication in 1963). I suspect Serling did write his two-page introduction... it has his cadences down.

The stories I loved decades before I encountered either volume include, among the Conklins' selections, were Sturgeon's "Shottle Bop", "Saki"'s "Gabriel-Ernest" and Bierce's "The Moonlit Road"; from the Dickson, Davidson's "The Montavarde Camera" and Stevenson's "The Bottle Imp", and I was a late-comer to the Wells, but only as late as reading it some years ago in Fraser and Wise's Great Tales of Terror and the Supernatural. A couple of the others, I liked rather than loved from my early reading, remembering them less well till refreshing my memories. 

Among the stories new to me in our volumes for today:

The Supernatural Reader:
"Pick-up for Olympus" by Edgar Pangborn is the one story original to either volume, a slight but amusing vignette about a 1960s (in this 1953 story) small-town garage mechanic enchanted by the durable but neglected 1930s Chevy truck that rolls into his gas station one day. So taken with the truck, he barely notes the rather unusual owners.

John Collier's "Bird of Prey" is good, mid-level Collier, a writer one can only suspect was high on Patricia Highsmith's inspiration list. And both students of Ambrose Bierce. A very happy couple (with only one notable sore spot between them) and their beloved pet parrot do not have a good time after a certain visitation by Another sort of bird.

Devils and Demons:
Carol Emshwiller's "Adapted" is a typically urgent recounting, not quite stream of consciousness but almost so, of the life of a woman who is of Other folk, at least on her father's side, and how she realizes this only rather late in life, and hopes she hasn't managed to cut this realization off in her quarter-Other daughter.

"A Time to Keep" by Kate Wilhelm is an interesting approach to her protagonist's free-floating anxiety, expressed in sustained hallucinations occasionally triggered by passing through doorways. Not completely successful, but a stepping-stone toward more assured work from later in her career. 




First US edition

First UK hardcover edition

UK paperback edition

For more of today's entries, please see Patti Abbott's blog.



Posted by at 9 comments:
Labels: , , , , , , , ,

Wednesday, January 20, 2021

Short Story Wednesday: stories from ROD SERLING'S NIGHT GALLERY READER edited by Carol Serling, Martin H. Greenberg & Charles G. Waugh (Dembner, 1987)

Some of the stories...the whole volume to follow...


the Contento/Stephensen-Payne/Locus index:

Rod Serling’s Night Gallery Reader ed. Carol Serling, Martin H. Greenberg & Charles G. Waugh (Dembner 0-934878-93-5, Dec ’87 [Nov ’87], $15.95, 326pp, hc) Anthology of 18 stories that were adapted as Night Gallery tv episodes.
  • ix · Introduction · Carol Serling · in
  • 1 · The Escape Route · Rod Serling · na The Season to be Wary, Little Brown: Boston, 1967
  • 71 · The Dead Man · Fritz Leiber · nv Weird Tales Nov ’50
  • 104 · The Little Black Bag · C. M. Kornbluth · nv Astounding Jul ’50
  • 138 · The House · André Maurois · vi Harper’s Jun ’31
  • 141 · The Boy Who Predicted Earthquakes · Margaret St. Clair · ss Maclean’s, 1950
  • 152 · The Academy · David Ely · ss Playboy Jun ’65
  • 163 · The Devil Is Not Mocked · Manly Wade Wellman · ss Unknown Jun ’43
  • 171 · Brenda · Margaret St. Clair · ss Weird Tales Mar ’54
  • 184 · Big Surprise [“What Was in the Box?”] · Richard Matheson · ss EQMM Apr ’59
  • 191 · House—with Ghost · August Derleth · ss Lonesome Places, Arkham: Sauk City, WI, 1962
  • 199 · The Dark Boy · August Derleth · ss F&SF Feb ’57
  • 215 · Pickman’s Model · H. P. Lovecraft · ss Weird Tales Oct ’27
  • 230 · Cool Air · H. P. Lovecraft · ss Tales of Magic and Mystery Mar ’28; reprinted in Weird Tales Sep ’39
  • 240 · Sorworth Place [“Old Place of Sorworth”;  Ralph Bain] · Russell Kirk · nv London Mystery Magazine #14 ’52
  • 261 · The Return of the Sorcerer · Clark Ashton Smith · ss Strange Tales of Mystery and Terror Sep ’31
  • 279 · The Girl with the Hungry Eyes · Fritz Leiber · ss The Girl With the Hungry Eyes, ed. Donald A. Wollheim, Avon, 1949
  • 297 · The Horsehair Trunk · Davis Grubb · ss Colliers May 25 ’46; ; as “The Secret Darkness”, EQMM Oct ’56
  • 308 · The Ring with the Velvet Ropes · Edward D. Hoch · ss With Malice Toward All, ed. Robert L. Fish, Putnam, 1968
the 1990 Knightsbridge paperback edition (courtesy Andy Austin):

Last Wednesday, I cited Rod Serling's novella "The Escape Route" and its failure as prose (even if it would serve, and probably did, as an acceptable "treatment" to get a script greenlit)...some well-turned dialog, not much else (and the script as shot made for a decent segment of the Night Gallery pilot film...another novella from the same Serling collection was also adapted as the second and weakest of the three stories, directed by Steven Spielberg in a rather painfully "arty" fashion and, like most Spielberg work, wildly overpraised, even giving credit for it being his first professional effort). So, as we build this book's review piecemeal, let's turn to some rather better work, by rather better writers of prose (and at least one of them a playwright who did rather better work at least in fantasticated scripting). 

"The Little Black Bag" is Cyril Kornbluth at his cynical best, the story of his also selected by a poll of the Science Fiction Writers of America for the first volume of their The Science Fiction Hall of Fame (though Kornbluth wrote several books' worth of short fiction in the same league), and as adapted for Night Gallery slightly watered down (such as having the secondary character become a middle-aged man rather than a young woman, perhaps to allow for casting a veteran actor, but even more likely to keep from offending those who would find the character's selfishness easier to take from a somewhat weatherbeaten male). A down and out, homeless and alcoholic ex-doctor comes across a bag of medical instruments more or less accidentally sent back in time from the future...and he and his default assistant find themselves able to do very good things...but the assistant decides the potential for profit should be exploited, with both tragic and ironic consequences.

"The House" is a deft and resonant if somewhat one-punch anecdote of a story; as a vignette, this is enough. I should re-subscribe to Harper's for several reasons, not least to get access to their archive and discover, perhaps, who translated this fine bit of horror (I first read it in Hal Cantor's Ghosts and Things, a Berkley Books anthology that was everywhere one might turn in the '60s and '70s, and one of the two first adult horror anthologies I read at a tender age).

David Ely's "The Academy" is another essentially one-punch story, a bit longer than a typical vignette but not Too much so, and so nicely worked out that even an adult reader who might see the reveal coming might simply continue to enjoy the ride. A suspense story of the disquieting rather than pulse-pounding sort...and even though there's no supernatural element to it, it's usually been reprinted in horror anthologies, such as Ray Russell's The Playboy Book of Horror and the Supernatural, where I first read it. Ely was usually good for this kind of disquiet, as in his near-future sf novel Seconds...very well filmed. For that matter, the NG adaptation of  "The Academy" is only a bit heavy-handed, and Bill Bixby did a very good job as the protagonist.

"The Girl with the Hungry Eyes" is one of the more brilliant of the early stories of the frequently brilliant Fritz Leiber, and it's a severe pity both the Leiber adaptations for Night Gallery were rather half-assed. (Oddly enough, the Lovecraft adaptations were the best I've seen that had been produced up till then, though that wasn't too tough, and they not matched for another decade or so.) A strange sort of psychic vampirism is exploited by both the "girl" (1949 will out) model and the photographer and sponsors  employing them. Another disquieting story, as usually the case with the best of Leiber's horror fiction, and there's no disputing the supernatural element in this one. I might've first read it in the 1978 revised edition of the early Leiber collection Night's Black Agents...

More to come from this volume...and a related one...






Posted by at 9 comments:
Labels: , , , , , , ,

Wednesday, January 13, 2021

SHORT STORY WEDNESDAY: Doris Pitkin Buck: "Why They Mobbed the White House"; Kate Wilhelm: "The Planners" (ORBIT 3, edited by Damon Knight, G. P. Putnam 1968); Donald Barthelme: "Robert Kennedy Saved from Drowning"; Leonard Michaels: "Crossbones" (NEW AMERICAN REVIEW #3, edited by Theodore Solotaroff, Signet/New American Library 1968); Rod Serling: "The Escape Route" ('TIS THE SEASON TO BE WARY by Serling, Little, Brown 1967)

 

Doris Pitkin Buck is probably the most obscure writer, these years, in the third volume of Damon Knight's new-fiction anthology series Orbit...a former actor and eventually on the English faculty at Ohio State, she was among the earliest of the women writers recruited as contributors by Anthony Boucher and Mick McComas at The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, and made a name for herself as much for her light verse  as her fiction for that magazine and elsewhere. I knew her granddaughter Laurel Buck slightly, when we were students at the University of Hawaii, and LB recalled DPB gathering the kids and letting them know, I hope tongue in cheek, that the flying saucers/UFOs were actually alien visitors come to help us out..."Why They Mobbed the White House" is a jovial story (distinct from certain recent events), taking the tack of the newly complex tax forms of the mid-'60s, and the increasing use of computers at the IRS and elsewhere, as jumping-off point for something a bit gentler than the typical "comic inferno" sf stories associated with Galaxy magazine and other markets in the '50s and '60s; told as a DC tour-guide's patter, it details how a certain couple found their way into the White House on the platform of having computers actually fill in rather than simply check tax forms. 

Kate Wilhelm's "The Planners" (which w0n the 1969 Nebula Award for best short story) digs a bit deeper and reads a bit heavier, while demonstrating a darker sort of wit. The planners in question include both biochemists and psychologists who use monkeys and apes (the latter including humans) as their test subjects, in seeing how injections of strains of RNA into their bodies enable...and disable...intellectual abilities...and eventually some of the subjects become planners as well. The protagonist, one of the primary researchers and a psychologist, is also consistently suffering...if that's the right word...a series of hallucinations that interact with his actual life, some seemingly simply reveries of sexual dalliance with various women, others rather more extended fantasias...he seems most grounded when exploring the nature of his relatively unhappy marriage.  The narrative slides through the various sorts of experience he has without too many indicators as to where he is departing from reality, but Wilhelm nonetheless makes it fairly clear where she wants to indicate consensus reality in the story, and where not. This story, even more than the Buck story, is indicative of the kind of literary grace the Orbit series would become famous for in its early years, in its relative departure from "realistic" prose form part of what had a number of more conservative writers and readers grumbling over its incomprehensibility...and a Nebula Awards ballot driven by the mutual admiration of a "Milford Mafia" (after the Milford Writer's Conferences Wilhelm and Knight, a married couple, were hosting by the latter '60s). 

Leonard Michaels also deals with a certain retreat from the reality of his characters', a tempestuous romantic couple's, situation, in the vignette "Crossbones"...
which might well've been inspired at least in part by his troubled first marriage, to the eventually suicidal Sylvia Bloch (Michaels is quoted in one online source as referring to her seeming at times "like a madwoman imitating a college student")...the first sentence in this very short story is a long paragraph (a man after my own heart thus). There are about seven or possibly ten sentences in the entirety, about the surreal abuse they subject each other to, and about the probable progress of the woman's father (possibly) on his machismic way over for a visit.  It's funnier if one isn't as aware of Bloch's eventual fate.

Sad fate also plays a role in "Robert Kennedy Saved from Drowning", but mostly in the string of events that led, not too long after publication, to RFK's death and, a couple of years later, to Edward Kennedy's near drowning (and not so near for Ms. Kopechne). Donald Barthelme's story apparently would've been accepted by William Shawn at The New Yorker if Barthelme was willing to change the title-character's name to something fictional, but Barthelme simply took it back and sold it to New American Review instead...I'd suggest correctly, seeing that this is, essentially, a piece of parodic fiction about how "sophisticated" magazine profiles of (particularly) political figures of RFK's position are all too often inane examples of marketing, hoping to convince the incautious or uninformed reader that every action on the part of their subject is heroic, every utterance sagacious (the one non-fictional anecdote in this "profile" occurred at a gallery, where RFK made a condescending joke about a certain painting, in the presence of the artist; Barthelme, a visual arts museum curator and journalist previous to his fiction-writing, wasn't favorably impressed). 

So...what all four of these stories are about, to one degree or another, is delusion, of the self and others. to some extent voluntarily accepted but mostly not so much. Can't imagine how they might've seemed appropriate to the times, nor that they might've found their way to reasonably avant-garde magazines in book form in 1968.






















The fifth story, Rod Serling's "The Escape Route", was one of the three newly-published novellas in his first (legitimate, not ghost-written) collection, The Season to be Wary, in 1967. Serling hoped to launch a career as a novelist, apparently (his brother, Robert Serling, had one, after all), and it, too, is about self-delusion...the fugitive concentration-camp second-in-command's delusions about his service to the Nazi regime, and his relative lack of self-delusion about his circumstances as the Nazi hunters of the 1960s are after him, in his unpleasant circumstances in Buenos Aires. Also about Serling's self-delusion that this novella (I've managed to get 20 pages in, about a third of the way through, as it was reprinted in Rod Serling's Night Gallery Reader, edited by widow Carol Serling, RS's old campus colleague Charles Waugh, and Waugh's typical editing partner Martin H. Greenberg; this trio presumably decided this novella was the least worst of the three. Sadly, while "The Escape Route" made for a decent if unsurprising segment of the Night Gallery pilot film (as I remember it from some 45 years ago), the prose of the novella can be described as passable treatment writing...clumsy, overstated, using poor word choices in the narrative passages...while the dialog, given Serling was not a novice as a playwright, isn't too shabby at all, and at times has a nice snap to it--when the preaching isn't getting a bit thick...another Serling flaw).

If not for the hour, or the nature of this day, I'd probably transcribe the first paragraph of the story...perhaps tomorrow...

For more Short Story Wednesday reviews, please see Patti Abbott's blog.  



Posted by at 4 comments:
Labels: , , , , ,

Friday, January 7, 2011

preview: PBS's PIONEERS OF TELEVISION: SF and Friday's "Forgotten" Books: THE ART OF HARVEY KURTZMAN by Kitchen & Buhle (Abrams 2009)

The remaining website page for this episode of POT, courtesy Marc (at PBS Interactive)'s long-missed note. (My comment there went up under my housemate's old joke-login).

So, lets deal with some attempts to celebrate some icons. The PBS series Pioneers of Television, which will be bumping the science-documentary series Nova over to Wednesdays for a couple of months starting on 18 January, returns for its second short season with an episode devoted theoretically to the pioneers of televised science fiction, at least in the US...a task which it slights pretty dismally, since it utterly fails to mention such 1950s series as Tales of Tomorrow or Science Fiction Theater, or even the relatively famous kiddie shows Captain Video (that stalwart of the DuMont network, which employed actual sf writers to do scripts, oddly enough) and Tom Corbett, Space Cadet. Instead, it focuses almost exclusively on Gene Roddenberry and Star Trek, Irwin Allen and Lost in Space (never quite managing to make clear that the similarly bad Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea preceded Lost onto the airwaves by a year, albeit mentioning this series and even interviewing a cast member from The Time Tunnel, apparently the most expensive of Allen's terrible quartet of '60s skiffy embarrassments), and then doubles back to Rod Serling and The Twilight Zone. Only actors are interviewed, though a bit of the footage of a famous (and much YouTubed) Serling interview, conducted by sf writer and lit professor James Gunn, is used as well, with Roddenberry and Allen represented in re-enactments at least as much as by still photos (I suspect for the cost of those cutesy re-enactments, any rights-fee questions could've been settled for any taped or filmed interviews with Roddenberry or Allen). The ST material is almost all likely to be familiar, as it is to me as a casual fan of the series and a devout fan of some of the sf writers who wrote for it (Robert Bloch, Theodore Sturgeon, Harlan Ellison, et al.--and Fredric Brown's classic story "Arena" was laughably poorly adapted for the hissing lizard-man episode), though Leonard Nimoy and to some extent Nichelle Nichols come off well in their interview segments (no attempt made, apparently, to sit down with George Takei, Walter Koenig, or any of the surviving off-camera talent). The usual misrepresentations of ST's pioneering of such matters as The "Interracial" Kiss--France Nuyen and Robert Culp had taken care of that in I Spy a season or so before, if indeed they were the first, either (and they actually kissed, rather than more or less rubbed faces), or of pioneering the use of metaphors for dealing with similar taboo subjects...when even the documentary itself has mentioned Roddenberry's previous series, the 1963-64 NBC cop show The Lieutenant, had broached at least some of these matters...and it typically manages to forget the rather more famous 1963-64 series East Side, West Side both in this context and as an example of a series with a recurring African-American woman character, Cicely Tyson's social-worker, who was not a domestic or otherwise blatantly stereotypical. To say nothing of utterly punting recognition of the sometimes effective, sometimes clumsy attempts to address such matters on The Twilight Zone and The Outer Limits (which series is Never mentioned here). At least Bill Mumy, Angela Cartwright, and Marta Kristensen are rather down to Earth about the utter goofiness of their series, Lost in Space, and again as a casual observer of media fandom I've heard less from them over the years (though they were clearly moved by a years-later visit to the Kennedy Space Center, where some of the scientists and technicians told them that their series had inspired the Floridans in their childhood to consider astronautics-oriented careers). Aside from Serling, only Veronica Cartwright (two sisters, no waiting...she was a child actor in the TZ adaptation of Ray Bradbury's "I Sing the Body Electric"), William Shatner, Peter Graves (albeit he mostly refers to his Corman film work) and Mumy (of course, his star-making child-actor turn in the adaptation of Jerome Bixby's "It's a Good Life--") are interviewed for the Serling series, and only brief mention is made of his later work, though at least they do cite some of his earlier, notable teleplays, such as "Requiem for a Heavyweight," and they run a bit of "Patterns." They cite how Bradbury was annoyed by an elision of a scene in the episode's final form, leading to a falling out between Bradbury and Serling, but, aside from a casual reference to Richard Matheson, they manage not to cite any of the other "Little Bradburys" who wrote for the series, such as William F. Nolan (whom Matthew Bradley notes in a comment below never saw his contributed script produced) or the series' best writer, Charles Beaumont (whom Bradley notes was ghosted in some of his last credited work, as his health failed, by Jerry Sohl). There are good bits, here and there, again mostly from the less self-important actors (the script, as narrated by Kelsey Grammer, even attempts to make a virtue of Shatner's take-ruining and scene-stealing), but this is a very poor showing for a series that has been a somewhat superficial but reasonably accurate historical survey in its previous episodes (I'll be reviewing the subsequent new episodes soon, devoted to crime and western drama). And it certainly notes the pressures from the network suits, for Serling to dumb things down, for Allen to go campy (which he gleefully did), and for Roddenberry to emulate Allen (or the unmentioned Outer Limits) and get more monsters on board (the multicolored womenoids, almost all hot for Kirk, apparently not quite enough exotica). And it wraps up with a pronouncement, plummily intoned by Grammer, that TZ was the best-written series in television history, a claim neither Serling nor any reasonable judge would make, even if we took only the Beaumont episodes into consideration; even Bill Mumy, in calling it the best tv series so far, isn't nearly as sweepingly wrong.



Meanwhile, I'm breaking my "rule" again here and am featuring a book that's still in print, albeit it might not be for long, and it certainly turns up a wealth of material from magazines and books that are harder to find. Comics historians Denis Kitchen (a comics artist and publisher, and executor of Kurtzman's estate) and Paul Buhle (a Brown University historian with particular interest in comics and Judaica) have produced a slightly stilted but reasonably informative and beautifully illustrated biography/Festschrift of Harvey Kurtzman, whose career was at least as spectacular in publishing as Serling's in electronic media, his influence at least as great, his ultimate disappointment with the shape of his career probably at least as heartbreaking to him. From his earliest comics aspirations and early one-page humorous strips, "Hey Look!", for Atlas/Timely Comics (which would become Marvel), through his revolutionizing war comics at EC while that house was coming to the fore with its similarly challenging horror titles, and then out-challenging everyone in that business when Mad, which he wrote and designed nearly every aspect of from founding in 1952 to 1956, became a huge success and the only title to long survive the attacks on EC from without (driven by such rabble-rousing as Frederic Wertham's distorting "study" The Seduction of the Innocent--which, it should be noted, was more focused on crime-fiction comics than even the horror titles) and within the comics industry (notably from the triumvirate, including Columbia pulp-line owner Louis Silberkleit, who published Archie Comics, and resented enormously and litigiously Kurtzman's parodies of their cash-cow throughout the decades)...and became, in the course of that success, ever more ambitious and rule-breaking (even the reformatted black-and-white Ballantine collections from the early years of Mad didn't adequately give a sense of all the elegances and innovations of the standard-sized, richly-colored comic book it was, the authors note, and how thrilled Kurtzman was when the title was remade, briefly, into a slick-paper, 8.5 x 11" magazine--the dimensions remain the same through today, but the paper was downgraded not long after). But Kurtzman's desire to continue to run Mad according to his vision was far less practically possible once it was no longer part of a profitable stable, but the sole EC publication, and publisher William Gaines was unwilling to turn it essentially completely over to Kurtzman...who then left, and much of Mad's glory left with him.

Kurtzman already had a fan in Hugh Hefner, who offered an opportunity to do a fully-slick, full-color, more "adult" humor magazine, and a few more artists, such as Arnold Roth, signed on along with a core of his staff from Mad for the two issues produced of Trump. Then a credit-line crunch, partly in the aftermath of the American News Company magazine-distributor dismemberment, slapped around the Playboy Enterprises cashflow and Hefner was, essentially, forced to fold Trump despite excellent sales; a core group of Kurtzman and his ex-Mad and -Trump cronies banded together to produce Humbug!, an inexpensive (from the distributors' point of view, probably Too inexpensive) small-format comic, which lasted for about a year and a half, from '57-'58; Kurtzman and his collaborators scrambled pretty hard for the next year or so, but received interesting assignments from such slick magazines as Playboy, Esquire, and Pageant, and Kurtzman published with Ballantine an all-original paperback comics collection, Harvey Kurtzman's Jungle Book (1958). In 1960, Kurtzman's fourth and last satire magazine emerged; James Warren, doing well with Famous Monsters of Filmland and its stablemates, was willing to partner on the release of Help! magazine, again in large-sized format but, if anything, on as much a shoestring budget as Humbug! had been. But Help! was about as important a snag in pop-culture history as Kurztman's Mad had been, reuniting most of the old crew from the previous three magazines, at least for occasional contributions, and adding such folks as Robert Sheckley, Ray Bradbury, Gahan Wilson, Serling and Algis Budrys mostly as script/text contributors, along with occasional work in this wise by the likes of Orson Bean, who also, like such up-and-coming comics and actors as Woody Allen and John Cleese (the latter in New York with an Oxbridge Fringe-inspired troupe), would star in the photos used in "fumetti" strips--similar to comic strips, with speech balloons coming from the actors in the photos. Also, for the first year of the magazine, rather more famous comedians and actors, ranging from Ernie Kovacs to Mort Sahl to Tom Poston, posed for humorous cover photos; most of these folks were apparently convinced to do so by assistant editor Gloria Steinem, just beginning her magazine-production career. She left after the first year, but was soon replaced by a promising young Midwestern cartoonist, Terry Gilliam, who was in place when Cleese was employed for his photo shoot; this would result in their mutual participation in Monty Python's Flying Circus when Gilliam moved to England to avoid the Draft in the latter '60s. Other Kurtzman-inspired young cartoonists, including Robert Crumb and Gilbert Shelton, contributed to the magazine in various ways; Crumb even a had a bit-role in a fumetti, as well as debuting Fritz the Cat in Help!. But the constant budget restrictions Warren offered, as well as his caving in quickly to the again-outraged Archie Comics folks after Kurtzman's recurring character Goodman Beaver had an adventure which thoroughly mocked Archie and company again, led to discontent...and the magazine folded in 1965. Beaver, a somewhat Candide-like figure (with an ambiguously provocative name) was pitched to Playboy, which countered with a desire to have Beaver become a female character, and the strips to have a fair amount of cheesecake in them, and thus was born Little Annie Fanny, who would be a prime source of income for Kurtzman and his usual partner on the strip Will Elder for nearly three decades. Other activities came and went, but Annie went on forever (and oddly rather resembles actress Loni Anderson, not on the scene in the early '60s, but who might've patterned her look after the character a bit).

But Kurtzman also had opportunities to teach, and see his work influence further generations of comics and comix artists, who understandably lionized him; his early projects in graphic novels were mostly stymied, aside from the collection of Goodman Beaver from Macfadden and the Ballantine original book, and best-ofs his magazines with Ballantine (Mad comics, Humbug!) and Fawcett Gold Medal (Help!). Kitchen and Buhle note that the kind of graphic novel he wanted to do, and did manage, in relatively short form, to see one impressive example published, reprinted here in color from The Saturday Evening Post, wouldn't be too common until after Will Eisner's A Contract with God appeared in 1978, and not popular nor critically acclaimed till the likes of Art Spiegelman's Maus in the next decade--true unless you take into account such works as Walt Kelly and Jules Feiffer were publishing in the 1950s and later. But it's a very handsome book and does some innovative presentations of unpublished and work-in-progress from Kurtzman and his collaborators. You would do well to supplement it as a history with such items as the Fantagraphics complete reprint of Humbug! (and its accompanying interviews) and their collection of interviews with Kurtzman, reprinted from their critical magazine The Comics Journal, but this is a valuable book. Even if Harry Shearer's witty, bitter intro is too short to be so prominently advertised.

Please see Patti Abbott's blog for more of today's "forgotten" books...
Posted by at 19 comments:
Labels: , , , , , , , ,
Subscribe to: Posts (Atom)