In 1982 Bruce McCall published his extraordinary Zany Afternoons, a nostalgic look back at the future that never happened.










There has never been anyone quite like Bruce McCall. His fascination with advertising recalls Harvey Kurtzman, and his obsession with the possibilities of now archaic technology has become routine for numerous steampunks. But the way McCall combines these interests, both repelled by yet somehow attracted to a previous generation's unyielding faith in the future, makes his vision unique.

McCall was born in Simcoe, Ontario, Canada in 1935. He recalled his childhood influences in a 2015 interview:

I grew up in Canada during World War Two, which meant black-and-white Canadian comics – an oxymoronic word cluster if ever there was one. For some weird reason, probably linked to paper rationing, American comic books only trickled across the border. My alternative was Chums magazine from the early Twenties, in fat bound annual volumes that my father consumed in his teens and never got around to throwing away. Stuffy, prolix, literate and laced with tales of derring-do as public school lads went off to defend the Empire, Chums was everything comic books were not, and I’m grateful for the difference.









The description of Chums magazine -- already nostalgia by the time McCall even read it -- inspires visions of Pythonesque Ripping Yarns. But it also makes me think of S.J. Perelman, a devoted reader of the purplest prose as a boy, then a satirical lampooner of his youthful reading habits in adulthood.

McCall spent almost two decades in the advertising business, first in 1950s Toronto specializing in drawing automobiles, then as a freelancer in New York. The breakthrough in his career came in 1970, when he joined the new National Lampoon, giving him an outlet for his half-nostalgic, half-satiric pieces.

McCall's fans are especially fond of his cars. His '50s models, inspired by his days in the ad trenches, capture the baby boomer obsession that bigger is better:

Another popular McCall target is the traditional nuclear family, always given anonymous, dead-eyed smiles:




 




 But for all his hilarious sendups of the '50s, McCall's greatest work harkens back to the 1930s. It's tempting to see this as the upper classes of Chums fiddling while Rome burns, as he loves to juxtapose the depression era with absurd decadence, such as this examination of the new fad among the super-rich, tank polo.



Or The Moto-Ritz Towers, a lavish Manhattan apartment building, complete with Zeppelin (perhaps the ultimate future technology that didn't happen?) hovering about.

 The depression setting gives this luxury car piece a depth not found in the Bulgemobile:

 You'll notice McCall's use of space in this last layout. Perhaps his masterpiece in this area is this spoof of the Titanic:

Although McCall's most impressive, jaw dropping work is his illustrations, he's also a plain old funny writer. For a Popular Mechanics spoof called "Popular Workbench" ("written so even you can understand it") he wrote these sidesplitting classified ads. Kurtzman and Al Feldstein did the same thing for Mad, but their work was never quite so surrealistically non-sequitur:

McCall could do similar pieces in a contemporary context, as in this take-off on discount store circulars done for a Lampoon Sunday newspaper parody:

There's a lot more Bruce McCall out there (such as his spoof of the baseball classic The Glory Of Their Times) but it'll have to wait until another blog entry.

DeSoto discovers the Mississippi:

If you're interested in exploring humor more thoroughly, check out my book What's So Funny? Theories Of Comedy, available at Amazon.

Jack Davis died earlier this week. He was the last of the great EC artists who revolutionized comic books in the 1950s.

Jack Davis self-portrait, c. 1960:

A native of Atlanta, Davis drew for his high school newspaper, served in the Navy during WWII, and attended the University of Georgia on the GI bill. In 1949 he used his fee from a job for Coca-Cola to go to New York, where he performed various jobs for various comic strips.

The key moment in his career came in 1950, when he began working for William Gaines' EC comics; this is where he met the brilliant writer-editor Harvey Kurtzman. EC was just starting their line of horror comics such as The Vault of Fear and Tales from the Crypt, which would soon take the comic book world by storm. Davis himself drew one of the best-remembered horror stories, "Foul Play", about a crooked baseball player who sells out his team. The (in)famous final panel, in which his teammates exact a gruesome revenge, was mentioned in Dr. Fredric Wertham's notorious 1954 attack on comic books, Seduction of the Innocent.

Warning: graphic image may offend some more sensitive readers (that is, wimps):

"Foul Play" - final panel

While Davis made himself comfortable in the macabre world of EC horror, Kurtzman founded the comic book where he would really be at home. Mad began in 1952 and immediately took pot shots at every aspect of American pop culture. Here Davis illustrates a Kurtzman piece on Hollywood bowdlerizing books:

Another example of the same theme, this time regarding westerns:

Along with Mad artists Will Elder and Wally Wood, Davis took quickly to the "chicken fat" style so beloved by Kurtzman, where every panel is crammed full of visual gags and references  (inspired by Bill Holman's Smokey Stover comic strip). Here's a wonderfully detailed Mad cover Davis did in 1956:

Perhaps Davis' masterpiece in this style, at least in terms of scale, is his eight page piece illustrating NBC's lineup of shows, done for TV Guide's fall preview issue in 1965:

Kurtzman left Mad in 1955, after a money/control dispute with Gaines. His great trio of artists followed him to other magazines like Trump and Humbug, but Kurtzman never again repeated the commercial success of Mad. Davis eventually returned to Mad in the mid '60s, producing one of his finest moments, illustrating writer Larry Siegel's parody "Hokum's Heroes". Now I'm a big Hogan's Heroes fan, and IMHO many criticisms leveled against the show are misinformed and unfair. But I can still appreciate jabs at the absurdity of the premise, and especially the spoof's classic final panel, a "promo" for a new sitcom:

In the early 1960s Davis began a lucrative career illustrating print ads, book and magazine covers, LP jackets, and movie posters. Though not his first movie job, his poster for It's A Mad Mad Mad Mad World established him in the field:

Davis spoofed this himself a few years later:

One of his more curious posters was for Robert Altman's "revisionist" version of Raymond Chandler's The Long Goodbye, done in the manner of a Mad parody. Perfect for the new era of self-aware irony:



Has anyone ever made a documentary on the EC comics in general, or the Kurtzman-era Mad in particular? I mean one focusing on the creative aspects rather than the controversies. I know some interview footage exists of Kurtzman and especially Gaines. Now that they're all gone I hope someone was able to record the stories of Davis, Elder, Wood, and other legends of the age.