FROM THE VALLEY OF THE UNPUBLISHED:

Occasionally, I am driven to do a finished piece of work just to see what the results will be, as with the comic below, created while I was freelancing for CRACKED Magazine during the late 1980s.

Moved by the potentials of their fictitious 'reporter', Nanny Dickering, I proposed a comic series. Even in the face of such stiff competition as John Severin, Bob Fingerman and Bill Ward (!), my brand of cheesecake was deemed too overt.

Colored with Design Art Markers, my chosen medium of the period.

Nanny's Granny.

Fragmentally Yours, MK

COPYRIGHT 2014 BY MILTON KNIGHT

ZOE

Drawn for HIGH TIMES, about 1991.

Intoxicatedly Yours, MK

COPYRIGHT 2014 BY MILTON KNIGHT

A SKETCH

COPYRIGHT 2014 BY MILTON KNIGHT

SKETCHES

Pictorially Yours, MK

COPYRIGHT 2014 BY MILTON KNIGHT

TOONS OF THE ORIENT 3

At Midnight on Jerry Beck's www.cartoonresearch.com site! My article, TOONS OF THE ORIENT 3: EAST STEALS WEST! 1930s Japanese animation swipes from American sources!

Asiatically Yours-MK

BETTIE PAGE: THE PERFECT TEMPLATE

Pervily Yours, MK

COPYRIGHT 2014 BY MILTON KNIGHT

LOOK BACK IN FELIX

A clever person has posted FOREVER RAFTER, one of the Felix shorts I directed in REVERSE. It's...totally weird! http://youtu.be/c9NdaCnA9zQ


Invertedly Yours, MK

COPYRIGHT 2014 BY MILTON KNIGHT

CARL WESSLER, PERVERSE DISNEY

The moment I saw the Jekyll-and-Hyde panels below, my artistic vision was forever altered.

Carl O. Wessler's (1913-1989) name is usually associated with his writing for EC horror comics. In fact, he had a colorful career that went back to a job at the Fleischers in the mid 1930s, which continued in Miami after the strike disputes (he had been a union organizer) and later back to New York. Throughout the early 1940s he freelanced humor comics work (even “teenage” comics!). He had affinities for war and horror scripts as well, beginning in the 1950s. Into the 1970s, he scripted for Harvey, DC and Marvel.

Collecting in the late 1970s, I was familiar with Carl Wessler's earliest wartime funny animal (called then "animation comics") work for the publisher Pines. Much of it was substandard. After the war, it became polished; it had a slapdash, improvised look that thrilled me as a kid. It suggested a "camp", perverse DISNEY'S COMICS AND STORIES. The dialogue could be wry and a little bitter ("I've tasted worse, but I've forgotten where!") Both characters and settings were playfully pliant and soft. You got the feeling he never used a ruler. He used decorative motifs for their own sake.

He worked for the major publishers as well as a galaxy of dinky ones. People often wonder why cartoonists would move between large studio “prestige” and comic book “slumming”. Wessler himself recalled that in 1946, he could do three covers in a day for $50 each and take off for the rest of the week. The fact that an artist's work could shine on its own must have been an additional pleasure.

The “Jekyll-and-Hyde” panels are from a Timely-Atlas comic, ALL SURPRISE, 1946. The rest are from TOYTOWN, from the same period.

Riotously Yours, MK

COPYRIGHT 2014 BY MILTON KNIGHT

FACEBOOK EXPERIENCE

So there's this FB old advertisement page where somebody posted one of those early 20th century ads with a soap able to 'cleanse' a black baby.

All these people (who I imagined to be Caucasian) were arguing about whether it was 'racist' or not, with terms like 'liberal' and 'Tea Party' being flung around. (One woman imagined the ad was selling to a black audience because deep down, being white is our idea of a good time.)

I came in and said: "One great thing about FB. I can see how white people rationalize things when I'm not around." They started bumping into each other like headless chickens, and eventually the thread was removed. Ain't I a DEVIL?

"Do what your heart tells you, and SHUT UP!!!"

A FEW ILLUSTRATIONS

Graphically Yours, MK

COPYRIGHT 2013 BY MILTON KNIGHT

VISIONS OF 'THE NEW CARTOON'

Technologies replace technologies. Printing books with woodcuts was supplanted by photographic reproduction, opening possibilities for authentic reproduction of art and color. As the camera became a new means for capturing reality, artists sought to visualize as yet uncaptured effects, giving rise to Impressionism, Expressionism; modern art, which is the only art the majority of people today are aware of.

Now that computers have come to replace traditional cel technologies in the arena of Disney-style features and mainstream TV, it’s the new artist’s job to reach into their imaginations to find out and do what computers cannot. It doesn’t provide a cushy job. The pioneers of technologies, the barrier breakers, had to work before their goals became industries. Those come after the goal is achieved.

Today's animated narratives are entering stagnation; I am not picking on their quality, but I do think they will stick in the same groove for a while. (And how many people REALLY enjoyed working on them in the first place?)

We enjoy and learn from the traditional, but the means that created it cannot be wished back. It can be an unsettling thing for anyone to do, but I feel animation and cartooning can enter a new realm with a creator’s unafraid search into their own minds to find the visions only one person has, their personal perceptions and truths, unrestrained by the vocabulary of yore. New visions, new means, new truths, a new experience. Computers cannot create those. They’re just great conduits.

I’m not just blowing smoke. I have my own ideas and goals. Scary? Hell, yes, but some brave caveman has to break the world out of this Dark Age. Maybe it's you.

Jaw-juttingly Yours, MK

COPYRIGHT 2014 BY MILTON KNIGHT

TWO SKETCHES IN ACRYLIC

I'm busy, so I'll let some art do the talking for me!

AWKWARD

SOUL TRAIN

Hurriedly Yours, MK

COPYRIGHT 2013 BY MILTON KNIGHT

YESTERDAY'S SKETCHES

COPYRIGHT 2013 BY MILTON KNIGHT

GRUN'S OO LA LA

Jules-Alexandre Grun (1868-1938, French) represented a breed that is perishing: the journalist/cartoonist; the chronicler of society, or at least the section he knew.

He was both painter and graphic artist, and he used his ink like he used his paint: to reveal and to glorify, not merely to cover up.


His posters were usually limited to black as the dominant, red as the accompaniment. This sparing palette conveyed more than a million candy colors.


His work was extremely popular then and highly collectible today. His big, sexy women help...

To complement the scene, THE APACHE KID (1930). A chase through the sewers of Paris. The term "Apache" here refers to cheap Parisian lowlifes and criminals. The traditional S&M dance-of-passion theme is "L'Amour De L'Apache" by Offenbach. Click pic.

Gallically Yours, MK

OUTBURSTS IN INK

Drawn with ragged kids' brushes and some sort of gooey paint (the label was missing).

Meanwhile, a Facebook friend, Devon Baxter, has immortalized ME!

Here's his FB page: https://www.facebook.com/devon.baxter.146

Spatteredly Yours, MK

BRUSH DRAWINGS COPYRIGHT 2013 BY MILTON KNIGHT