Graphic Grandeur (Dangerous When Wet Edition)

 

Fifty summers ago, this Roger Kastel-illustrated poster made its debut on the exteriors, and in the lobbies, of movie theatres across the nation and around the world, promising filmgoers a terrifying cinematic experience. However, movie posters often promise things that the actual movies then fail to deliver. Did Jaws live up to its poster's promise? Well, if you were a filmgoer fifty summers ago--and most people didn't bother with movies during the summer until this one completely changed the business model--you already know the answer to that question, but play along with me anyway as we watch the trailer: 

Trailers also sometimes promise more than the actual movie delivers, even as it's a slicing and dicing of the actual movie. Trust me, though, Jaws delivered (with a lot of slicing and dicing of a different sort.) Personally, I've always found the film more exciting than out-and-out scary, but that's fine with me. Whatever gets the heart thumping. Based on a then-recent bestselling book by Peter Benchley (Robert's grandson) and only the second feature film by the then-still-in-his-20s Steven Spielberg, it quickly became the all-time box-office champ and remained so for the next two years until topped by another summer blockbuster Star Wars (which in turn was topped a few years later by Spielberg's E.T., the Extraterrestrial which made its debut during--you guessed it--the summer.) One thing that had no chance of topping it--at least not in the commercial sense--was some magazine parody, but that doesn't means my then-middle-school-age-self couldn't get a giggle out of this:

Looks like unsafe swimming conditions all around.

Illustration by Mort Kunstler

 

Graphic Grandeur (Here We Go with Another Ridiculous Mad Cartoonist Tribute Edition)

 

1921-1923

Longtime, very longtime, Mad magazine cartoonist Al Jaffee died April 10 at the age of 102. Seven years earlier, Jaffee, then still a working artist, took time out from his work schedule to give some insights on how he got by as one of "The Usual Gang of Idiots" at Mad:

Jaffee finally retied from Mad in 2020. It seems to have been a voluntary retirement. The magazine itself for all practical purposes was retired by corporate owner EC Comics Kinney National Company AOL Time Warner Communications AT&T Media Bros Discovery, Inc.--did I leave out DC Comics? Ted Turner? Hanna-Barbara? --two years earlier, subsisting mostly on reprints, though Jaffee did manage to get two original works published, the Fold-Ins that he was best known for, in that period. So he got paid for a job at a job that no longer existed. How many of us can say that?

Al Jaffee had an unusual, and somewhat tragic, childhood. Born in the United States to Jewish immigrants from Lithuania, Jaffee's homesick mother moved him and his brothers back to the shtetl (Yiddish for small town) where she had grown up, while the father stayed behind. With the rise of Nazism and the increasing possibility that there would be a war, the father insisted the boys come back to America. The mother herself refused to budge. She disappeared in the Holocaust.

"I dealt with it long ago and determined that moving on to happy, new adventures were more rewarding than dwelling on old tragedies."

Jaffee and Elder

One of those happy, new adventures may have been New York City's High School of Music & Art, a magnet school established by then-Mayor Fiorello H. LaGuardia for artistically inclined adolescents. There Jaffee befriended, or was befriended by, Will Elder, who would go on to become one of Mad's original artists (though he may have gained as much renown for Playboy's long-running Little Annie Fanny strip.)

One of Jaffee's first jobs as a cartoonist was at Timely Comics, a predecessor of Marvel Comic, where he wrote and drew a superhero parody called Inferior Man. Looks like he used the opportunity to get back at Hitler for what he did to his family.

Jaffee had a single-panel syndicated newspaper strip for a few years in the late 1950s and early 1960s. 

The above looks like Mad, but it's actually from a short-lived competitor, Trump, created and edited by Harvey Kurtzman (who in fact had earlier created and edited Mad.) Jaffee worked there and at another short-lived Kurtzman magazine Humbug, before finally deciding to give Mad itself a try. Publisher William M. Gaines looked at Jaffee's work in both magazines, liked, and probably laughed at, what he saw, and gave Al a job. For some 65 years Jaffee regularly entertained Mad readers with Snappy Answers to Stupid Questions, proposals for wacky inventions, the Vietnam era Hawks and Doves, and of course the famous Fold-Ins. Enjoy:

 

 

 

Graphic Grandeur (The Usual Gang of Influencers Edition)

 

1929-2022

Illustrator Paul Coker Jr's remarkable career rests on three mighty pillars. In the mid-1950s he got hired on at Hallmark Cards and very soon became one of that company's top artists. His scratchy style set a tone for humorous cards that is still widely copied nearly 65 years later. If that wasn't enough, he started contributing to Mad beginning in 1960, and quickly became one of that magazine's mainstay artists. And if that wasn't enough, in the mid-1960s Rankin/Bass Productions asked Coker to design the characters for a stop-motion TV Christmas special titled Santa Claus is Coming to Town. The next year he designed the characters for the more traditionally animated Rankin/Bass TV Christmas special Frosty the Snowman, and just about everything else from that company in the decades since. Though it's his Mad work that I most cherish, the Rankin/Bass productions probably got Coker his widest audience (with the Hallmark cards a close second) and that's also what got him the following 2015 radio interview. Actually, it's kind of a behind-the-scenes radio interview that's a little like an old Bob Newhart routine where you hear only the second half of a phone conversation. But as with Newhart, that's enough:  

 

Seems like a nice guy. Now those three pillars I mentioned:

Only 122 shopping days until Christmas.