Maurice Sendak’s First Published Illustrations: Discover His Drawings for a 1947 Popular Science Book

in Art, Science | August 30th, 2024

McGraw-Hill/pub­lic domain; copy from the Niels Bohr Library & Archives

Once upon a time, long before Mau­rice Sendak illus­trat­ed Where The Wild Things Are (1963), he pub­lished, notes Ars Tech­ni­ca, “his first pro­fes­sion­al illus­tra­tions in a 1947 pop­u­lar sci­ence book about nuclear physics, Atom­ics for the Mil­lions.” Only 18 years old, Sendak pro­vid­ed the illus­tra­tions; his physics teacher, Hyman Ruch­lis authored the text, along with pro­fes­sor Maxwell Leigh Eidi­noff.

Accord­ing to sci­ence his­to­ri­an Ryan Dahn, “Sendak agreed to do the work for 1% of the roy­al­ties, of which he received an advance of $100, about $1600 today.” Not bad for a teenag­er cre­at­ing his first cred­it­ed work.

At Physics Today, you can read Dah­n’s new arti­cle on Sendak’s ear­ly physics illus­tra­tions. You can also read/view all of Atom­ics for the Mil­lions on the HathiTrust web­site.

Relat­ed Con­tent

The Only Draw­ing from Mau­rice Sendak’s Short-Lived Attempt to Illus­trate The Hob­bit

An Ani­mat­ed Christ­mas Fable by Mau­rice Sendak (1977)

Mau­rice Sendak Sent Beau­ti­ful­ly Illus­trat­ed Let­ters to Fans — So Beau­ti­ful a Kid Ate One

 

 

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How Marcel Duchamp Signed a Urinal in 1917 & Redefined Art

in Art, History | August 26th, 2024

Mar­cel Duchamp did­n’t sign his name on a uri­nal for lack of abil­i­ty to cre­ate “real” art. In fact, as explained by gal­lerist-Youtu­ber James Payne in the new Great Art Explained video above, Ducham­p’s grand­fa­ther was an artist, as were three of his sib­lings; he him­self attained impres­sive tech­ni­cal pro­fi­cien­cy in paint­ing by his teen years. In 1912, when he was in his mid-twen­ties, he could tran­scend con­ven­tion thor­ough­ly enough to bewil­der and even enrage the pub­lic by paint­ing Nude Descend­ing a Stair­case, which also drew crit­i­cisms from his fel­low Cubists for being “too Futur­ist.” From then on, his inde­pen­dent (and not entire­ly un-mis­chie­vous) streak became his entire way of life and art.

That same year, Duchamp, Con­stan­tin Brân­cuși, and Fer­di­nand Léger went to the Paris Avi­a­tion Salon. Behold­ing a pro­peller, Duchamp declared paint­ing “washed up”; what artist could out­do the appar­ent per­fec­tion of the form before him? Get­ting a job as a librar­i­an, he indulged in a stretch of read­ing about math­e­mat­ics and physics.

This got him think­ing of the pow­er of chance, one of the forces that moved him to put a bicy­cle wheel in his stu­dio and spin it around when­ev­er the spir­it moved him. This he would lat­er con­sid­er his first “ready­made” piece, delib­er­ate­ly cho­sen for being “a func­tion­al, every­day item with a total absence of good or bad taste” that “defied the notion that art must be beau­ti­ful.”

The famous uri­nal, enti­tled Foun­tain, would come lat­er, in 1917, after he had relo­cat­ed from Paris to New York. Tech­ni­cal­ly, he did­n’t sign his name on it at all, but rather “R. MUTT,” for Richard Mutt, a name par­tial­ly “inspired by the com­ic strip Mutt and Jeff, which Duchamp loved. And Richard is French slang for a rich showoff, or a mon­ey­bags.” Sub­mit­ted by a “female friend” and hid­den behind a cur­tain at the show at which it made its debut, the orig­i­nal signed uri­nal would nev­er be seen again. But it pro­voked a suf­fi­cient­ly endur­ing curios­i­ty that, near­ly half a cen­tu­ry lat­er, a mar­ket had emerged for care­ful­ly craft­ed sculp­tur­al repli­cas for Foun­tain and the oth­er ready­mades. The irony could hard­ly have been lost on any­one with a sense of humor — or a will­ing­ness to ques­tion the nature of art itself — like Ducham­p’s.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

The Icon­ic Uri­nal & Work of Art, “Foun­tain,” Wasn’t Cre­at­ed by Mar­cel Duchamp But by the Pio­neer­ing Dada Artist Elsa von Frey­tag-Lor­ing­hoven

What Made Mar­cel Duchamp’s Famous Uri­nal Art–and an Inven­tive Prank

The Mar­cel Duchamp Research Por­tal Opens, Mak­ing Avail­able 18,000 Doc­u­ments and 50,000 Images Relat­ed to the Rev­o­lu­tion­ary Artist

Hear the Rad­i­cal Musi­cal Com­po­si­tions of Mar­cel Duchamp (1912–1915)

Hear Mar­cel Duchamp Read “The Cre­ative Act,” A Short Lec­ture on What Makes Great Art, Great

When Bri­an Eno & Oth­er Artists Peed in Mar­cel Duchamp’s Famous Uri­nal

Based in Seoul, Col­in Marshall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the Sub­stack newslet­ter Books on Cities and the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.

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Jack Kerouac’s Hand-Drawn Cover for On the Road (1952)

in Art, Books | August 19th, 2024

This falls under the cat­e­go­ry, “If you want it done right, you have to do it your­self.”

In 1950, when Jack Ker­ouac released his first nov­el, The Town and the City, he was less than impressed by the book cov­er pro­duced by his pub­lish­er, Har­court Brace. (Click here to see why.) So, in 1952, when he began shop­ping his sec­ond nov­el, the great beat clas­sic On the Road, Ker­ouac went ahead and designed his own cov­er. He sent it to a poten­tial pub­lish­er A.A. Wyn, with a lit­tle note typed at the very top:

Dear Mr. Wyn:

I sub­mit this as my idea of an appeal­ing com­mer­cial cov­er expres­sive of the book. The cov­er for “The Town and the City” was as dull as the title and the pho­to back­flap. Wilbur Pippin’s pho­to of me is the per­fect On the Road one … it will look like the face of the fig­ure below.

J.K.

Wyn turned down the nov­el, and it would­n’t get pub­lished until 1957. It would, how­ev­er, become a best­seller and be pub­lished with many dif­fer­ent cov­ers through the years. They’re all on dis­play here.

If you would like to sign up for Open Culture’s free email newslet­ter, please find it here. Or fol­low our posts on Threads, Face­book, BlueSky or Mastodon.

If you would like to sup­port the mis­sion of Open Cul­ture, con­sid­er mak­ing a dona­tion to our site. It’s hard to rely 100% on ads, and your con­tri­bu­tions will help us con­tin­ue pro­vid­ing the best free cul­tur­al and edu­ca­tion­al mate­ri­als to learn­ers every­where. You can con­tribute through Pay­Pal, Patre­on, and Ven­mo (@openculture). Thanks!

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Jack Kerouac’s Hand-Drawn Map of the Hitch­hik­ing Trip Nar­rat­ed in On the Road

Hear Jack Ker­ouac Read from On The Road on the 100th Anniver­sary of His Birth

Four Inter­ac­tive Maps Immor­tal­ize the Road Trips That Inspired Jack Kerouac’s On the Road

Jack Ker­ouac Lists 9 Essen­tials for Writ­ing Spon­ta­neous Prose

Jack Kerouac’s “Beat Paint­ings:” Now Gath­ered in One Book and Exhi­bi­tion for the First Time

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J. G. Ballard Demystifies Surrealist Paintings by Dalí, Magritte, de Chirico & More

in Art, Books, Literature | August 14th, 2024

Before his sig­na­ture works like The Atroc­i­ty Exhi­bi­tion, Crash, and High-Rise, J. G. Bal­lard pub­lished three apoc­a­lyp­tic nov­els, The Drowned World, The Burn­ing World, and The Crys­tal World. Each of those books offers a dif­fer­ent vision of large-scale envi­ron­men­tal dis­as­ter, and the last even pro­vides a clue as to its inspi­ra­tion. Or rather, its orig­i­nal cov­er does, by using a sec­tion of Max Ern­st’s paint­ing The Eye of Silence. “This spinal land­scape, with its fren­zied rocks tow­er­ing into the air above the silent swamp, has attained an organ­ic life more real than that of the soli­tary nymph sit­ting in the fore­ground,” Bal­lard writes in “The Com­ing of the Uncon­scious,” an arti­cle on sur­re­al­ism writ­ten short­ly after The Crys­tal World appeared in 1966.

First pub­lished in an issue of the mag­a­zine New Worlds (which also con­tains Bal­lard’s take on Chris Mark­er’s La Jetée), the piece is osten­si­bly a review of Patrick Wald­berg’s Sur­re­al­ism and Mar­cel Jean’s The His­to­ry of Sur­re­al­ist Paint­ing, but it ends up deliv­er­ing Bal­lard’s short analy­ses of a series of paint­ings by var­i­ous sur­re­al­ist mas­ters.

The Eye of Silence shows the land­scapes of our world “for what they are — the palaces of flesh and bone that are the liv­ing facades enclos­ing our own sub­lim­i­nal con­scious­ness.” The “ter­ri­fy­ing struc­ture” at the cen­ter of René Magritte’s The Annun­ci­a­tion is “a neu­ron­ic totem, its round­ed and con­nect­ed forms are a frag­ment of our own ner­vous sys­tems, per­haps an insol­u­ble code that con­tains the oper­at­ing for­mu­lae for our own pas­sage through time and space.”

In Gior­gio de Chiri­co’s The Dis­qui­et­ing Mus­es, “an unde­fined anx­i­ety has begun to spread across the desert­ed square. The sym­me­try and reg­u­lar­i­ty of the arcades con­ceals an intense inner vio­lence; this is the face of cata­ton­ic with­draw­al”; its fig­ures are “human beings from whom all tran­si­tion­al time has been erod­ed.” Anoth­er work depicts an emp­ty beach as “a sym­bol of utter psy­chic alien­ation, of a final sta­sis of the soul”; its dis­place­ment of beach and sea through time “and their mar­riage with our own four-dimen­sion­al con­tin­u­um, has warped them into the rigid and unyield­ing struc­tures of our own con­scious­ness.” There Bal­lard writes of no less famil­iar a can­vas than The Per­sis­tence of Mem­o­ry by Sal­vador Dalí, whom he called “the great­est painter of the twen­ti­eth cen­tu­ry” more than 40 years after “The Com­ing of the Uncon­scious” in the Guardian.

A decade there­after, that same pub­li­ca­tion’s Declan Lloyd the­o­rizes that the exper­i­men­tal bill­boards designed by Bal­lard in the fifties (pre­vi­ous­ly fea­tured here on Open Cul­ture) had been tex­tu­al rein­ter­pre­ta­tions of Dalí’s imagery. Until the late six­ties, Bal­lard says in a 1995 World Art inter­view, “the Sur­re­al­ists were very much looked down upon. This was part of their attrac­tion to me, because I cer­tain­ly did­n’t trust Eng­lish crit­ics, and any­thing they did­n’t like seemed to me prob­a­bly on the right track. I’m glad to say that my judg­ment has been seen to be right — and theirs wrong.” He under­stood the long-term val­ue of Sur­re­al­ist visions, which had seem­ing­ly been obso­lesced by World War II before, “all too soon, a new set of night­mares emerged.” We can only hope he won’t be proven as pre­scient about the long-term hab­it­abil­i­ty of the plan­et.

via Flash­bak

Relat­ed con­tent:

Sci-Fi Author J.G. Bal­lard Pre­dicts the Rise of Social Media (1977)

What Makes Sal­vador Dalí’s Icon­ic Sur­re­al­ist Paint­ing “The Per­sis­tence of Mem­o­ry” a Great Work of Art

An Intro­duc­tion to René Magritte, and How the Bel­gian Artist Used an Ordi­nary Style to Cre­ate Extra­or­di­nar­i­ly Sur­re­al Paint­ings

When Our World Became a de Chiri­co Paint­ing: How the Avant-Garde Painter Fore­saw the Emp­ty City Streets of 2020

J. G. Ballard’s Exper­i­men­tal Text Col­lages: His 1958 For­ay into Avant-Garde Lit­er­a­ture

An Intro­duc­tion to Sur­re­al­ism: The Big Aes­thet­ic Ideas Pre­sent­ed in Three Videos

Based in Seoul, Col­in Marshall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the Sub­stack newslet­ter Books on Cities and the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.

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Public.Work: A Smoothly Searchable Archive of 100,000+ “Copyright-Free” Images

in Archives, Art | August 12th, 2024

We live in an age, we’re often told, when our abil­i­ty to con­jure up an image is lim­it­ed only by our imag­i­na­tion. These days, this notion tends to refer to arti­fi­cial intel­li­gence-pow­ered sys­tems that gen­er­ate visu­al mate­r­i­al from text prompts, like DALL‑E and the many oth­ers that have pro­lif­er­at­ed in its wake. But how­ev­er tech­no­log­i­cal­ly impres­sive they are, they also reveal that our imag­i­na­tion has its lim­its, giv­ing form only to what we can put into words. To be inspired prop­er­ly again, we must explore far­ther afield, in the visu­al realms of oth­er times and places, which we can eas­i­ly do on a site like Public.work.

Jason Kot­tke describes Public.work as “an image search engine that boasts 100,000 ‘copy­right-free’ images from insti­tu­tions like the NYPL, the Met, etc. It’s fast with a rel­a­tive­ly sim­ple inter­face and uses AI to auto-cat­e­go­rize and sug­gest pos­si­bly relat­ed images (both visu­al­ly and con­tent-wise). And it’s fun to just visu­al­ly click around on relat­ed images.”

These jour­neys can take you from vin­tage mag­a­zine cov­ers to for­eign chil­dren’s books, life­like for­eign land­scapes to elab­o­rate world maps, Japan­ese wood­block prints to road­side Amer­i­cana — or such has been my expe­ri­ence, at any rate.

“On the down­side,” Kot­tke adds, “their sourc­ing and attri­bu­tion isn’t great — espe­cial­ly when com­pared to some­thing like Flickr Com­mons.” Accord­ing to librar­i­an Jes­samyn West, Public.work isn’t exact­ly a search engine, but an inter­face for a site called Cos­mos, which describes itself as “a Pin­ter­est alter­na­tive for cre­atives” meant to cre­ate “a more mind­ful inter­net.”

Get­ting the full sto­ry behind any par­tic­u­lar images you find there will require you to put a bit of ener­gy into research, or at least to locate the fruits of research done else­where on the inter­net. As for what you do with them, that will, of course, depend on your own cre­ative instincts. Enter Public.work here.

via Kot­tke

Relat­ed con­tent:

Cre­ative Com­mons Offi­cial­ly Launch­es a Search Engine That Index­es 300+ Mil­lion Pub­lic Domain Images

A Search Engine for Find­ing Free, Pub­lic Domain Images from World-Class Muse­ums

The Smith­son­ian Puts 4.5 Mil­lion High-Res Images Online and Into the Pub­lic Domain, Mak­ing Them Free to Use

Down­load for Free 2.6 Mil­lion Images from Books Pub­lished Over Last 500 Years on Flickr

The British Library Puts 1,000,000 Images into the Pub­lic Domain, Mak­ing Them Free to Reuse & Remix

Free: Down­load 5.3 Mil­lion Images from Books Pub­lished Over Last 500 Years

Based in Seoul, Col­in Marshall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the Sub­stack newslet­ter Books on Cities and the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.

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The First Animation That Hayao Miyazaki Directed on His Own: Watch Footage from the Pilot of Yuki’s Sun (1972)

in Animation, Art | July 30th, 2024

Hayao Miyaza­ki began his career as an ani­ma­tor in 1963, get­ting in the door at Toei Ani­ma­tion not long before the com­pa­ny ceased to hire reg­u­lar­ly. Miyaza­k­i’s equal­ly retire­ment-resis­tant con­tem­po­rary Tet­suya Chi­ba, already well on his way to fame as a man­ga­ka, or com­ic artist, pub­lished the series Yuki no Taiy­ou, or Yuk­i’s Sun, that same year. But the paths of their work would­n’t cross until 1972, when Yuki no Taiy­ou was adapt­ed into a pilot for a prospec­tive ani­mat­ed series, the very first project Miyaza­ki — who had by that point amassed a good deal of expe­ri­ence as not just a key ani­ma­tor and col­lab­o­ra­tor with Stu­dio Ghi­b­li co-founder-to-be Isao Taka­ha­ta, but also as a man­ga­ka him­self — direct­ed solo.

Despite hav­ing been orphaned as an infant, the tit­u­lar Yuki grows into a high-spir­it­ed tomboy so cheer­ful as to have devel­oped the odd habit of phys­i­cal­ly strik­ing oth­er peo­ple when she gets too hap­py.

And as with so many par­ent­less pro­tag­o­nists in chil­dren’s fic­tion, she has not just a dis­tinc­tive per­son­al­i­ty but also a sto­ry-dri­ving desire to dis­cov­er the truth about her ori­gins — which, it’s inti­mat­ed, may not be ordi­nary, and may indeed be spe­cial. Her search for her moth­er sends her on a quest through moun­tain, val­ley, wood, and, giv­en the set­ting of Japan’s north­ern­most island of Hokkai­do, a great deal of snow (the Japan­ese word for which is a homo­phone of Yuk­i’s name).

Alas, this is a quest tele­vi­sion audi­ences would nev­er see, since the plot for Yuki no Taiy­ou, footage from which you can see in the five-minute teas­er above, did­n’t draw a net­work order for a full series. In some respects, it seems con­cep­tu­al­ly sim­i­lar to Sasur­ai no Shou­jo Nell, or Wan­der­ing Girl Nell, a volu­mi­nous­ly loose adap­ta­tion of Charles Dick­ens’ The Old Curios­i­ty Shop that aired in Japan at the end of the sev­en­ties. By that time, Miyaza­ki had com­plet­ed work on his first ani­mat­ed fea­ture as direc­tor, The Cas­tle of Cagliostro. A few years there­after, he would adapt his own man­ga Nau­si­caä of the Val­ley of the Wind into a motion pic­ture now wide­ly con­sid­ered the debut of the lav­ish, cap­ti­vat­ing Stu­dio Ghi­b­li style — and whose epony­mous pro­tag­o­nist has more than a lit­tle in com­mon with the adven­tur­ous, nature-lov­ing Yuki.

Relat­ed con­tent:

Watch Hayao Miyaza­ki Ani­mate the Final Shot of His Final Fea­ture Film, The Wind Ris­es

The Phi­los­o­phy of Hayao Miyaza­ki: A Video Essay on How the Tra­di­tion­al Japan­ese Reli­gion Shin­to Suf­fus­es Miyazaki’s Films

Hayao Miyaza­ki, The Mind of a Mas­ter: A Thought­ful Video Essay Reveals the Dri­ving Forces Behind the Animator’s Incred­i­ble Body of Work

The Films of Hayao Miyaza­ki Cel­e­brat­ed in a Glo­ri­ous Con­cert Arranged by Film Com­pos­er Joe Hisaishi

Hayao Miyazaki’s Uni­verse Recre­at­ed in a Won­der­ful CGI Trib­ute

Based in Seoul, Col­in Marshall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the Sub­stack newslet­ter Books on Cities and the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.

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Behold the Kräuterbuch, a Lavishly Illustrated Guide to Plants and Herbs from 1462

in Art, Books, History, Nature | July 29th, 2024

When Kon­rad von Megen­berg pub­lished his Buch der Natur in the mid-four­teenth cen­tu­ry, he won the dis­tinc­tion of hav­ing assem­bled the very first nat­ur­al his­to­ry in Ger­man. More than half a mil­len­ni­um lat­er, the book still fas­ci­nates — not least for its depic­tions of cats, pre­vi­ous­ly fea­tured here on Open Cul­ture. Even the works derived from it have charms of their own: take the Kräuter­buch (or “Book of Herbs”) from 1462, in which Duke Albrecht III of Bavari­a’s per­son­al physi­cian Johannes Hartlieb adapts a sec­tion of the Buch der Natur with its own full com­ple­ment of 160 illus­tra­tions.

“Hartlieb’s sub­ject is plants, most­ly herbs, and their med­ical uses,” says the Library of Con­gress, on whose site you can view and down­load the book. “What makes the Kräuterbuch spe­cial is the side-by-side pre­sen­ta­tion of text and images. The high cost of such a rich­ly dec­o­rat­ed book makes it unlike­ly that it was actu­al­ly used by doc­tors or phar­ma­cists of the time.”

But even if they lack a cer­tain sci­en­tif­ic prac­ti­cal­i­ty, these botan­i­cal pre­sen­ta­tions have a bright, sim­ple bold­ness that, in some respect, suits our visu­al aes­thet­ics here in the ear­ly twen­ty-first cen­tu­ry; you could call it a renais­sance equiv­a­lent of flat design.

“Each chap­ter of the Kräuter­buch fol­lows a tra­di­tion­al sys­tem of botan­i­cal clas­si­fi­ca­tion derived from the Greek philoso­pher Theophras­tus,” writes Hunter Dukes at the Pub­lic Domain Review, which also offers a gallery of the book’s illus­tra­tions. “Ani­mals are por­trayed as phar­ma­co­log­i­cal­ly knowl­edge­able, such as in an account of deer rub­bing them­selves on pep­per­weed (Lep­id­i­um lat­i­foli­um) to remove hunters’ arrows”; anoth­er sec­tion holds that “dead­ly car­rots (Thap­sia) aid beg­gars in their decep­tions — rubbed on the face, they will pro­duce signs of lep­rosy, which can also be cured with vine­gar.” Dis­cussing the poi­so­nous man­drake (see image imme­di­ate­ly above), Hartlieb car­ries for­ward von Megen­berg’s sug­ges­tion “that its mag­i­cal prop­er­ties should be kept secret from com­mon­ers,” who, nat­u­ral­ly, would nev­er be in pos­ses­sion of such a lav­ish tome. Now all of us can access the Kräuter­buch — and most of us know that we’d be bet­ter off not mess­ing around with man­drake at all.

via the Pub­lic Domain Review

Relat­ed con­tent:

The New Herbal: A Mas­ter­piece of Renais­sance Botan­i­cal Illus­tra­tions Gets Repub­lished in a Beau­ti­ful 900-Page Book

Hor­tus Eystet­ten­sis: The Beau­ti­ful­ly Illus­trat­ed Book of Plants That Changed Botan­i­cal Art Overnight (1613)

A Curi­ous Herbal: 500 Beau­ti­ful Illus­tra­tions of Med­i­c­i­nal Plants Drawn by Eliz­a­beth Black­well in 1737 (to Save Her Fam­i­ly from Finan­cial Ruin)

Behold a 15th-Cen­tu­ry Ital­ian Man­u­script Fea­tur­ing Med­i­c­i­nal Plants with Fan­tas­ti­cal Human Faces

The Sur­pris­ing Map of Plants: A New Ani­ma­tion Shows How All the Dif­fer­ent Plants Relate to Each Oth­er

Based in Seoul, Col­in Marshall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the Sub­stack newslet­ter Books on Cities and the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.

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The Page That Changed Comics Forever: Discover the Innovative 1950s Comic Book That Almost Went Unpublished

in Art, Comics/Cartoons | July 22nd, 2024

If you grew up read­ing Amer­i­can com­ic books dur­ing the sec­ond half of the twen­ti­eth cen­tu­ry, you’ll be famil­iar with the seal of the Comics Code Author­i­ty. I remem­ber see­ing it stamped onto the upper-right cor­ner of issues of titles from The Amaz­ing Spi­der-Man to reprints of Carl Barks’ Scrooge McDuck sto­ries to Jug­head Dou­ble Digest, but I can’t say I paid it much mind at the time. This was in the nine­teen-nineties, by which time the Comics Code itself has lost much of its force. But back when it was cre­at­ed, in 1954, it had as much restric­tive pow­er over the con­tent of com­ic books as the “Hays Code” once had over motion pic­tures.

Accord­ing to the video from Youtu­ber matttt above, the Comics Code was imple­ment­ed in response to one pub­lish­er above all: EC Comics, whose grim and graph­ic titles like Tales from the Crypt and The Vault of Hor­ror made both a big impact on pop­u­lar cul­ture and a dent in the rep­u­ta­tion of the comics indus­try. Clos­ing ranks, that indus­try formed the Comics Code Author­i­ty to enforce a regime of self-cen­sor­ship, man­gling EC in its gears just as it was about to pub­lish one of the most inno­v­a­tive sto­ries in its form: “Mas­ter Race,” the tale of an ex-SS offi­cer in mod­ern-day New York, by an artist named Bernard Krig­stein.

At its height, EC was a ver­i­ta­ble comics fac­to­ry, with a set of pro­ce­dures in place that ensured the effi­cient pro­duc­tion of cheap thrills — often at con­sid­er­able cost to the poten­tial of the medi­um. Krig­stein, who’d always har­bored high­er artis­tic aspi­ra­tions, chafed at these lim­i­ta­tions, find­ing such workarounds as sub­di­vid­ing rigid­ly defined pan­el spaces into sets of sequen­tial images, the bet­ter to con­vey move­ment and action. Nowhere did this tech­nique prove more effec­tive than in “Mas­ter Race,” with its prac­ti­cal­ly cin­e­mat­ic tour de force sequence in which the haunt­ed Carl Reiss­man slips under the wheels of a pass­ing sub­way train.

Qual­i­ty takes time, and Krig­stein missed the sto­ry’s dead­line just before the Comics Code went into force. “Mas­ter Race” was pub­lished a few months lat­er, albeit in one of EC’s new, san­i­tized, and thus much less pop­u­lar titles. The meth­ods of visu­al sto­ry­telling he refined have now become stan­dard ele­ments of com­ic art, but the medi­um’s enthu­si­asts can sense how far Krig­stein could have gone, if not for the frus­tra­tion that ulti­mate­ly caused him to aban­don comics for a career as a high-school teacher: “Some­thing tremen­dous could have been done,” he said, “if only they’d let me do it.” With the Comics Code long since defunct — and now that EC’s most dis­turb­ing comics look tame — con­tent has become a free-for-all. But what artist dares to be as bold as Krig­stein in push­ing for­ward the form?

Relat­ed con­tent:

The Dis­ney Artist Who Devel­oped Don­ald Duck & Remained Anony­mous for Years, Despite Being “the Most Pop­u­lar and Wide­ly Read Artist-Writer in the World”

1950s Pulp Com­ic Adap­ta­tions of Ray Brad­bury Sto­ries Get­ting Repub­lished

Why the Short-Lived Calvin and Hobbes Is Still One of the Most Beloved & Influ­en­tial Com­ic Strips

How Art Spiegel­man Designs Com­ic Books: A Break­down of His Mas­ter­piece, Maus

George Herriman’s Krazy Kat, Praised as the Great­est Com­ic Strip of All Time, Gets Dig­i­tized as Ear­ly Install­ments Enter the Pub­lic Domain

“Thou Shalt Not”: A 1940 Pho­to Satir­i­cal­ly Mocks Every Vice & Sin Cen­sored by the Hays Movie Cen­sor­ship Code

Based in Seoul, Col­in Marshall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the Sub­stack newslet­ter Books on Cities and the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.

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