Here's a novelty that I didn't know existed before: a "Christmas Carol" parody written by Harvey Kurtzman and drawn by caricaturist David Levine. It appeared in Esquire sometime in the early sixties.
It's not Levine's best work, and Kurtzman's seen better days but, c'mon, any collaboration by talents like these demands a viewing. BTW, click to enlarge.
It's eerie to see Levine doing comics. Lots of famous illustrators came to grief in the comics medium. Evidently sequential storytelling requires a knack that's rarer than commonly supposed.
Then again, you could argue that this is a parody of comics in general as well as of the
Christmas Carol in particular. It probably looked a lot better on slick magazine paper than on the net, and it probably made a nice visual counterpoint to the photography in the rest of the magazine.
I'm amazed at how well the formal, standard-font lettering works in the word balloons, and how the borderless panels fit Levine's style so well. Elder did borderless panels for Humbug and the same technique didn't work for him.
1 comment:
I am not familiar with Levine's work and I found the story a bit tricky to follow along at first in terms of the way the panels were organized, but it's still great stuff worth looking at!
I would have also preferred if there was much more variance between thick and thin lines and inking.
Off topic, but what computer or laptop do you currently use? I'm thinking of the post you did where you literally had to use your mouse to draw. I thought most artists were using MacBook Pro or something like that.
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