Self-Reflective Screwballs: Basil Wolverton and Harvey Kurtzman Rarities from Timely's Krazy Komics

The junkyard of mainstream comics yields a few welcome surprises, strewn amidst the toxic waste of 60+ years of lost opportunities, failed experiments and money-making assembly-line product.

Those few worthy items--a dust mote per each acre of bodily waste--keep some of us still obsessively digging, straining, and running to wash our hands as something of genuine merit is unearthed, hosed off, and examined.

The decade of shared digital comics scans on the Internet has liberated older comics from their former near-invisibility. Until, say, 2008, it was impossible for most people--save a few hard-core hoarders who had a head-start on the rest of us--to really grok how faceless and dull most American comic books really have been, since their inception.

A potential wealth of material awaits on such sites as The Digital Comic Museum and Comic Book Plus. Their scans are thoughtfully indexed by publisher, and in chronological publication order. Each day, new scans, some of them beautifully faithful to the printed source material, appear, gratis.

It's easy to take this ongoing phenom for granted. Most of this material is considered in the public domain--a stricture that removes almost all the efforts of major publishers of the 1930s through the present.

Thanks to the genuinely heroic efforts of the essential site More Than Heroes: Timely-Atlas Comics, we have immediate access to a conduit of hundreds of unauthorized scans of comics from the company that would eventually be known as Marvel. Its curator offers a weekly random bouquet of western, crime, teen, romance, humor, horror, SF and super-hero material, again organized by publication title and issue.

Paul Tumey and I have discussed the fascinating ups and downs of the Timely-Atlas-Marvel product here before. The company's output is the great middle-ground of American comic book history. Never a trailblazer, T-A-M was a shameless cash-in company. A trend might occur at D.C., E.C., Quality or other publishers. Before the ink was wet on the first issues of those companies' innovations, T-A-M would have a simulacra on the newsstands to sop up any leftover gravy.

Once said trend peaked, those cast-offs would be killed, and another topical title put in its place. This strategy helped the company tread water during the doldrums of the late 1950s, and allowed them to emerge as a major imprint in the '60s.

Among the least rewarding T-A-M titles are their humor comics. Off-kilter, butt-ugly (un)funny animals, anemic teens and irksome, violence-prone tots were their stock in trade. The company just never got the hang of humorous comics.

Certain artist-writers, looking for a place to blow off some steam, found an unlikely ally in the T-A-M (un)funny comics. Two of comics' best and most idiosyncratic creators--Basil Wolverton and Harvey Kurtzman--did stints with the company in the 1940s and '50s. Wolverton worked at T-A-M from the early 1940s 'til the mid-'50s; Kurtzman's work appears for about three years.

The cream of Kurtzman's work for T-A-M are his one-page "Hey Look!" strips. This series shows Kurtzman's development from promising tyro to master of absurd, graphically devastating metacomedy. Someday, someone will do a full-color reprint of the series, to replace the still-useful black and white (and way out-of-print) collection issued by Kitchen Sink Press in 1992.

Here's a particularly nice example of "Hey Look!" The page bristles with visual and comedic innovation, and shows the influence of "cartoon modern" sensibilities rampant in post-war animation, advertising and graphic design:

Kurtzman did a significant amount of other humor features for T-A-M--from ripoffs of "Blondie" to lively, adroit funny-animal material.

His learning curve is impressive, despite the quality of the stories themselves. When left to his own devices as a writer-artist--as in "Hey Look!"-- the results are often brilliant.

As a work-for-hire cartoonist, Kurtzman was professional and, like Dick Briefer, able to leave the imprint of his personality on the dullest of mundane work. But, as with Briefer, it's clear to see when Kurtzman's heart was not in his work.

Somewhere in-between "Rusty" and "Hey Look!" falls the lone episode of "Muscles Malone," from the first issue of the second version of Krazy Komics, published in 1948.(cover, seen at left, is decidedly not by HK)

No one would call "Muscles Malone" a narrative masterpiece. Kurtzman's cartooning, however, is eye-candy of the nth order. The vigor, aggression and expression of his posing, linework and layout--which eerily predicts the work of Ren and Stimpy auteur John Kricfalusi--is highly rewarding. It's much more than the slight story deserves, and it's possible Kurtzman wasn't too proud of it. He signed it with a humble HK, hidden in a blue star (part of a visual effect) on the splash page.

"Eustace Hayseed," one of several strips by Joseph Sulman that imitates Al Capp's work to a depressing degree, follows "Malone." The heart of a first-time browser immediately sinks, after the visual highs of Kurtzman's fluid foolery. Sulman, who also drew "Zatara the Magician" for D.C.'s Action Comics in the 1940s, was a leading agent in comics-shitmaking of the so-called Golden Age.

The sheer number of unskilled copyists of Capp, Crane, Raymond, Foster and Caniff in 1930s and '40s comics are among the medium's lowlights. Their work is a reminder that most mainstream comic book artists, past, present and future, are essentially cheerful plagiarists, brimming with enthusiasm, but with nothing personal or different to bring to the page. Their work is filler of the saddest stripe, and proof of the inherent cynicism of most comic book publishers.

"Eustace" is enough to make all but the bravest abandon hope. After a few stale pages of this bald-faced Capp-crap, it's a bracing pleasure to encounter the work of a true eccentric.

Basil Wolverton would have been familiar to T-A-M's more faithful readers, due to his long-running "Powerhouse Pepper" series, which appeared in various company humor anthologies, and in its own book--a sign of its apparent appeal and success.

Wolverton's "Pepper," a cross of Voltaire's Candide and E. C. Segar's Popeye (and seen here from the pages of 1945's Joker Comics #19), is shot through with a trademark linguistic quirk. Manic alliteration and internal rhymes, usually fused to a name, gives Wolverton's work a rhythm unique to the comics, period.

Self-reflective humor was another strong element of "Powerhouse," and its off-putting, utterly charming effect was seldom put to better use than in Wolverton's two efforts for the 1948 Krazy Komics.

As with "Hey Look!," this work shows one of the best aspects of Golden Age publisher cynicism: cartoonists with something unusual to say could express themselves loud, proud and clear--as long as their work was filler.

"Piston Pete - The Hotel Clerk" is one of Wolverton's most amusing screwball souffles. Loaded with puns, alliterations, wordplay and--most importantly--with the characters' cheerful self-awareness--this is low comedy meta-lunacy at its best. Read, McSneed...

Wolverton's mountain of chaotic-yet-droll komics seldom yielded a story as focused--and outright fun--as "Piston Pete." From the start, the reader never knows exactly where each succeeding panel will lead them.

Page nine is a hailstorm of offhanded inspiration. The first tier delivers a sub-par vaudeville joke, then assumes its reader will need a moment to laugh. If anything, the portrait of Blaine Payne, intended as a respite from the melee, proves far funnier--and more out of cloud-cuckoo-land--than anything else in the story. Capped by the author's admission that the first joke wasn't really funny, the tier is screwball gold.

Were the rest of the page filler, Wolverton could be easily forgiven. He's just warmed up. Hatch H. Hutch (of Hotch) proves his innocence to a determined cop by producing a copy of the very comic book we're reading.

Hutch points out some damning evidence of the villain's malfeasance, convinces the law, and then stops for a sidebar of gorgeous existential ponder:

This sort of self-reflective humor was nothing new. Animated cartoon directors of the 1930s and '40s had gone through these motions many times before. Wolverton makes something new of  a potential trope with this beautiful moment of introspection.

Kurtzman is nowhere in sight in the next (and last) issue of Krazy Komics, but Wolverton wanders by with another jolt of jazzy jibberish in "Flap Flipflop - The Flying Flash."

This is more familiar Wolverton turf--the rough-house outdoor world of "Powerhouse Pepper," in which the environment becomes as much a character as the interchangeable sentient beings. It's no surprise that Pepper does a walk-on, on page seven, to help extricate Ice-Pick McNick from a bear-trap.

The droll parade of gags, rattling with wordplay, includes another bit of self-reference, in which Flap plugs the sub-par Timely feature "Tessie the Typist," in an apparent attempt to charm the editors.

Alas, it was a pass--Krazy Komics was killed without much ado. As an outlet for Wolverton's growing sense of the absurd, KK might have paved the way for an upswing in off-the-wall, unpredictable comic-book chaos.

Kurtzman and Wolverton were to meet again, with spectacular results, in the pages of Mad (in its comic-book and magazine incarnations), including the cover to its 11th issue, which remains one of the primal images of mid-century American pop culture. Could Krazy Komics have planted the seed of this image? If so, it probably didn't kare.

© 2014 Frank M. Young

Suicide Slum Comix: Simon and Kirby's Subversive Comics About Comics

Comics are inherently playful. They can stretch time out thousands of years -- or compress 100 years into a small box. Comics' potential for playfulness is still largely untested. Looking over the extant history of the comic book, in particular, one is struck by how rarely its creators cut loose with their own medium.

Comics are hard work. From writing to penciling to inking, it's a long haul, and often a solitary slog. No matter how savvy an artist or writer may be, the inescapable task remains. A blank page must be filled with words and images. The words take much thought to write; the images take much longer to design, sketch and render. If those images are to be printed in color, the artist (or another talented person) has to choose and apply the colors. That, too, requires much time and thought.

Comics-making can be joyless work--although the endgoal is to please and captivate the reader.

The consumption of comics can be joyous, if the work itself satisfies--or confounds--reader expectations. Without a lot of hard, high-focus work, the stories themselves, good, bad or so-so, wouldn't exist for us to snarf down. As Dan Nadel sagely notes in his introductory text to the book Art In Time:

"A worthy story... is always the difficulty of comics."

Thus, mainstream Golden and Silver Age comics about the act of making comics were seldom too playful. It's as if all the hard work of creating comics--the unavoidable writing and drawing, the late-nighters and tense deadline hauls--has made them a sacred cow.

Modern comics have embraced autobiography--from the pioneering efforts of Justin Green, Robert Crumb and Harvey Pekar to modern practitioners such as Joe Matt, Seth, and even Yoshiro Tatsumi. The comic book that has received the most critical praise and attention, Art Spiegelman's Maus, is, in part, an autobiography--which includes scenes of the act of making comics. (Spiegelman's recent MetaMaus takes this duality even further.)

A medium as reflective, and as malleable, as comics begs for a playful attitude--in both creators and consumers. Comics about comics (CaCs) have the potential to unleash an antic side of its creators' psyches. Why, then, were so many earlier comics-on-comics so self-deprecating--and so unrevealing of the true nature of making comics? Is this a reflection of the low status of the comic-book artist?

Take, for example "Cartoonist's Calamity," the nightmarish Bill Everett saga of a cartoonist's world that appeared in Timely-Atlas' Venus #17 (Dec. 1951).

Jimmy Rogers, the harried protagonist of this story, is one stressed-out soul, at once alienated and alienating to others. The pressures of his job as cartoon editor of Beauty magazine (the home base of the Venus universe) have turned him into a hostile, sunken-eyed abuser. (To read this Everett gem, see our earlier posting here.


Speaking of Kalamities, there's the klassic E.C. fillip, "Kamen's Kalamity" (Tales From The Crypt #31- Aug/Sept 1952). E. C. published many CaC stories. They are all about the creators, and not their creations. In "Kalamity," William Gaines, Al Feldstein and Kamen, portrayed as a gentle, affable bad joke-loving goofus, appear in an in-jokey story that parodies the tropes of the E. C. horror stories while also catering to them. 

 Jack Kamen, as pictured in his E. C. comics profile feature

Two excerpts from "Kamen's Kalamity," showing Gaines, Feldstein and artist Kamen

Whimsical though these E. C. CaC stories are, they reveal nothing about the actual process of creating comics. The character sketches of Gaines and Feldstein, as hyperbolic worry-warts in search of a story gimmick, are amusing, but they don't offer a real picture of their work process. As can be seen by Kamen's publicity picture above, the E. C. staff were working stiffs, sleeves rolled up, cigarettes smoldering in a nearby ashtray, and butts numb from hours in front of the drawing board. The E. C. creators lavished remarkable visual--and verbal--detail on their stories. These were not laugh-happy playboys, dashing off comics stories in a festive mode. 


One of the forgotten, longest-running CaC series was Quality Comics' Pen Miller, an Ellery Queen flavored riposte about a crime-solving cartoonist, The feature ran for almost all of the 1940s in National Comics and then Crack Comics. Again, the profession of a cartoonist/comic book creator takes a back seat to something much more glamorous. The talented Klaus Nordling penned Pen. 

Curiously Miller's cartoon style looks exactly like Nordling's. To our knowledge, Nordling never actually portrayed himself in his own CaCs. You can read several examples of "Pen Miller" here.


A considerably more autobiographical, and winning treatment of the profession of cartooning occurs in Sheldon Mayer's baby, Scribbly. This feature was even longer-running, starting in the proto-comics of the mid-1930s and lasting into the early 1950s. Like almost all of the early CaC stories, Scribbly is short on the details of the art of creating comics, but it does go a long way towards sharing the sheer love of making comics.


Here's a sequence from the series' early years that shows Mayer's CaC feature was solidly about the adventure of being a cartoonist more than the reality.

Another comics master who put a version of himself into his stories was Jack Cole. Starting in his earliest stories, he also captured the sheer joy of comics -- as if imagining a super-hero into existence was the sames as making him real.





Sadly, Cole -- like nearly everyone in the early years -- tended to portray himself as a goofus. In an early Plastic Man story, he's a stuttering, small-minded hick:




Cole also created two little-known stories featuring a character called Inkie; a sort of "Out of the Inkwell" cartoon come to life. This was part of a long-running series at Quality, but Cole's stories are standouts. Here's one:

Learn more about Jack Cole's self-referential comics at Paul Tumey's blog.

So far, we've exclusively discussed CaCs about cartoonists and their lives in front of--and away from--the drawing board. There is a variant CaC story, seen less often, that is far more creative, self-aware and revealing. In these story, the characters--not the creators--create the content of the stories themselves, as we observe them at work.

In these stories, the work is not polished professional stuff--it's deliberately crude, raucous and rebellious of the craft of comics. Ironically, these stories give us more of the heart and soul of their creators--which makes their relative scarcity truly regrettable.

John Stanley created one of the best-known examples of this CaC variant for his best-selling comic book Marge's Little Lulu. When Lulu became a regular Dell Comics series, in 1948, Stanley created a two-page text feature called "Lulus Diry." Laden with typos, X-ed out words, run-on sentences and malapropisms, Stanley's early "Diry"s featured "picturs by Lulu too"--ramshackle, sublimely childish scrawls that reveal aspects of the Lulu Moppet character that her own stories, by their objective viewpoint, could not show us. This allows us to see the character from the inside-out, in a way that most comic book stories never can.

Here is the second "Lulus Diry," from 1948:

The use of speech balloons, and occasional sound effects, marks "Lulus Diry" as a type of comics. The feature quickly lost its ramshackle look and feel, but continued through Stanley's tenure on the Little Lulu title. You can read more about "Lulus Diry" here at Frank's blog, Stanley Stories.

Before "Lulus Diry," one of the dream teams of Golden Age comics had pioneered this approach. Joe Simon and Jack Kirby, while at DC Comics in the early 1940s, brought tremendous energy and charm to a comics imprint more known for its bland, polished product. In and of themselves, the Simon-Kirby work for DC expresses the love of creating comics. Their panels burst with energy and attitude, and their pages defy the orderly grids of Superman and Batman.

In one of their last stories for DC, Simon and  Kirby directly reference the making of comics, from the flawed hands of their own characters, in a single story that shows a path comic books might have taken, but seldom did until the age of autobiographical comics.

"Cabbages and Comics," from Star-Spangled Comics #29 (Feb. 1944), combines the rowdy, Warner Brothers-like atmosphere of the Simon-Kirby comics world with a berserk attack on the law and order of the comic book field, circa 1944. Joe Simon's inking seems a bit berserk, itself, on the first few pages of the story, but as it continues, we see a prime example of the Simon-Kirby team at the top of their game.

In this story, the kids of the Newsboy Legion decide to create their own, hand-drawn comic book for their neighborhood of Suicide Slum. Talk about a labor of love! Each edition Suicide Slum Comics is individually hand-crafted by the Legion--in a remarkable anticipation of the DYI mini-comix movement that began in the 1970s.

There's nothing remotely like this elsewhere in the history of early comic books. Before we show you the story, please take a moment to savor this highly subversive burst of raw energy...

Each panel is drawn (and signed) by a member of the Newsboy Legion. Like "Lulus Diry," these intentionally primitive drawings reveal something about the consciousness of the characters. For example, the garrulous Gabby can only draw stick figures:

Big Words' frames betray his significant, erudite vocabulary, and a rudimentary understanding of foreshortening--which, in turn, reveals the hand of Jack Kirby, with a sly wink:

Scrapper's take on comics anticipates Gary Panter by four decades:

And now, here is "Cabbages and Comics," including its cover image, for yez readin' enjerment...

"Cabbages and Comics" emerges from a void which immediately sealed itself for several decades. American comic-book creators, prior to the autobiographical pioneers, seemed to assume that their profession was too lowly to portray realistically. Nor were they comfortable enough to approach their trade with such lunacy as Simon and Kirby--who themselves, in the mid-1940s, reached a level of self-confidence (and star status) that few of their peers attained.

This is by no means an exhaustive survey of Comics about Comics. We feel there is much more to be said on this topic. We hope that, by opening up a dialogue on this seldom-discussed byroad of comics, we can encourage others to contribute to a deeper understanding and appreciation of this flexible, playful and reflective art form.

--Paul Tumey and Frank M. Young, 2011

P.S.: Alter Ego #105 features an abridged, full-color version of our premiere Comic Book Attic article. Look, Ma, we're in print! You can buy the paper or digital version of this new issue here.