FANTAGRAPHICS BOOKS
CARTOONIST: Bernard Krigstein (1919-1990)
EDITOR: Greg Sadowski
ISBN: 1-56097-573-3; hard cover
232 pages, color, $49.95
B. KRIGSTEIN COMICS is the companion volume to the award-winning B. Krigstein Vol. 1, a 2002 illustrated biography of the late cartoonist and illustrator, Bernard Krigstein (1919-1990), also edited by Greg Sadowski. Krigstein’s name often makes the short list of pioneering comic book artists, but most of his work, with the exception of the stories he did for the legendary EC line of comics, has been unavailable since the original publications.
Sadowski selected 34 stories (including eight Krigstein did for EC) for this tome. Krigstein believed that each comics panel was by itself a work of art; a panel was a single statement, which had to live by itself before it could live together with other panels. This, he believed, was the path to moving comics beyond the immature work that has marked the medium since the inception of original comic book stories in the mid to late 1930’s. The stories Sadowski chose reveal that Krigstein’s work lived what he preached, following his own advise to becoming the cartoonist as artist.
I would be remiss to call these selections short stories. They’re more like novellas and short novels because the cartoonist was able, perhaps nine out of 10 times, to create a panel that was complete – serving plot, character, and setting. In that way, one page of comics was like 10 pages of text, if not more. The selections span what Sadowski considers Krigstein’s mature period, beginning in 1949 and moving to the year 1957, when the artist left the comic book industry in frustration. In that eight year period, one can see Krigstein rapidly become a virtuoso, taking writers’ static scripts and turning them into comix or sequential art, whatever one wants to call the illustrated narratives we know as comic books.
Thanks to the lovely restorative work by Sadowski, Lou Copeland, and this book’s chief colorist, the wonderfully talented Marie Severin, we can marvel at Krigstein’s imaginative designs and rich compositions. Anyone who believes that comic books can be and sometimes are art will find verification in B. Krigstein Comics. The 34 stories are fun to read and illuminating as a historical and scholarly volume. A+
