Comic Books as the Grimms’ Fairy Tales of Pop Culture

On making out the shape of our society through its gods of good and evil.

Comic books can be a medium for serious nonfiction and a canvas for creativity in album art, but they are their own medium with a singular visual vocabulary honed by generations of pioneering artists. In this excerpt from Masters of Comic Book Art (quaintly, only available on VHS), speculative fiction writer Harlan Ellison introduces ten of the world’s greatest comic book artists, beginning with the great Jack Kirby.

(He also mentions in passing a curious factoid: there are only five forms of art considered natively American — the banjo, jazz, musical comedy, the mystery story, and comic books.)

Comic books were the training ground for me in terms of ethics, in terms of the things I learned about courage, good and evil, what heroism was, right and wrong. Comic books are the Grimms’ fairy tales of the popular culture — they’re done by serious people who care about the work they do, even as Van Gogh and Magritte and everyone else did.” ~ Harlan Ellison

It’s also fascinating to hear Kirby peel the curtain on the train of curiosity behind his iconic DC Comics series New Gods:

…I began to ask myself… Everybody else has their own gods — what are ours? What is the shape of our society and the form of myth and legend? Who are our gods? Who are our evil gods, and who are our goods ones?”

For a great primer on the making and milestones of the beloved visual storytelling medium, see the 2005 book Masters of American Comics.

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How Iconic Album Cover Illustrator R. Crumb Brought Comics to Music

What Janis Joplin has to do with rediscovering yesteryear’s forgotten masters.

Alex Steinweiss may be the father of the modern album cover, but Robert Crumb is its favorite weird uncle. Though best-known as a pioneer of the underground comix movement, the subversive artist had long been fascinated with the music of the 1920s and 1930s — jazz, big band, swing, blues, cajun — so when, in 1968, Janis Joplin asked him to design the cover for her album Cheap Thrills, it was the beginning of R. Crumb’s prolific second career illustrating hundreds of covers for artists emerging and legendary. In fact, Crumb’s covers for yesteryear’s forgotten masters were so influential in and of themselves that they spurred the rediscovery of many of these old records in the 1960s and 1970s.

R. Crumb: The Complete Record Cover Collection captures Crumb’s quirky, beautiful work and his enduring legacy in 450 vibrant four-color, black-and-white, and monocolor illustrations that exude his love of music and his love of art in equal measure. Accompanying his unmistakeable record covers are also posters, calling cards, advertisements, and stand-alone portraits of icons like James Brown, Frank Zappa, Gus Cannon, George Jones, Woody Guthrie, and more.

In this narrated short, Crumb, who eventually learned to play the uke, banjo, and mandolin himself, talks about the convergence of his two passions:

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Film, Film, Film: 1968 Soviet Animated Parody of the Movie Industry

A vintage satirical look at cinema’s ego and bureaucracy.

In 1968, Russian animator Fyodor Khitruk — best-known for the Russian animated adaptation of Winnie the Pooh and his 1962 gem, Story of a Crime — set out to parody the ego-driven, bureaucratic world of Soviet cinema. The result was Film, Film, Film — a satirical short film telling the story of how a historical movie is made through near-silent pantomime. Its aesthetic — a dynamic mix of minimalist yet provocative image and typography — is somehow reminiscent of the Information Age visual vernacular Marshall McLuhan and designer Quentin Fiore were crafting on the other side of the Iron Curtain around the same time.

Part two continues below:

Film, Film, Film, along with other groundbreaking animated shorts from Russian animation pioneers, can be found on Masters Of Russian Animation — a remarkable collection of animated shorts from the 1960s through 1980s in four volumes.

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A Booklover’s Map of Literary Geography circa 1933

On the Bostoncentricity of literature, or what “our first man of letters” has to do with Poe.

Two of my great loves — maps and books — converged on my friend Wendy‘s wall, where I spotted this stunning vintage map of “literary geography.” Titled The Booklovers Map of America Showing Certain Landmarks of Literary Geography and created by pictorial cartographer Paul M. Paine in 1933, the map zooms in on the biggest literary cities and places “The Birthplace of American Literature” squarely in the Boston/Cambridge area.

A few closeups:

With its charmingly unpunctuated, almost stream-of-literary-consciousness text, the map is as much a cartographic treasure as it is an almanac of early twentieth century literary celebrity.

For more unusual, creative, culturally sensitive maps, see these 7 fantastic books of and about maps.

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