As a teenage comix geek in the early 1970s, I vaguely knew that Joe Kubert, the man responsible for Sgt. Rock, Hawkman, Tor, and Enemy Ace, was a not-so-secret pacifist. I didn’t know how much of an influence he had — and would continue to have — on younger generations of graphic artists:
Joe Kubert, a titan among comic-book artists whose work stretched from the Golden Age of the superhero to the gritty realism of the graphic novel, died on Sunday in Morristown, N.J. He was 85…
Through the Kubert School, an academy in Dover, N.J., that he founded with his wife, Muriel, in 1976, Mr. Kubert helped train a generation of young colleagues. The country’s only accredited trade school for comic-book artists, it enrolls students from around the world in a three-year program; well-known graduates include Amanda Conner, Tom Mandrake, Rags Morales and Timothy Truman.
Mr. Kubert was often described as a war artist, but as he made clear in interviews and in his work, it was far more accurate to call him an antiwar artist. His distinctive visual style — raw, powerful and unstinting in emotional immediacy — was ideally suited to capturing the brutality of battle, and capture it he did, over more than a half-century.
Besides Sgt. Rock, whom he drew for decades, and Our Army at War, a DC series of the 1950s and afterward, Mr. Kubert explored war and violence in a series of graphic novels he wrote and illustrated in recent years: “Fax From Sarajevo” (1996), about the Bosnian civil war; “Yossel” (2003), about the Warsaw Ghetto uprising; and “Dong Xoai” (2010), about the Vietnam War…
Joseph Kubert was born on Sept. 18, 1926, in the shtetl of Yzeran (also known as Jezierzany), then in Poland and now in Ukraine. He came to the United States with his family as an infant and grew up in the East New York section of Brooklyn, where his father was a kosher butcher…
The first comic he illustrated himself, Volton, about a hero with electrical powers, was published when he was 16. After graduating from the High School of Music and Art in Manhattan, Mr. Kubert served stateside in the Army before becoming a full-time artist. …
From 1967 to 1976 Mr. Kubert was DC’s director of publications, with duties that included overseeing the company’s line of war comics. He took the post when the Vietnam War was at its height, and under his supervision the company’s war comics reflected as much.
At the end of each comic Mr. Kubert directed the typesetter to add a four-word coda. It read, “Make War No More.”
And today comes the sad news that Mr. Kubert will have a worthy companion on the ride to Valhalla. The Comics Reporter talks about the man most of us remember mainly as the inventor of Soylent Green:
The comics artist and comic strip writer turned successful and influential fiction author Harry Harrison died earlier today according to news released via his official web site. He was 87 years old…
Harrison served in the US Army Air Forces during World War II, as a mechanic and gunnery instructor. He joined in 1943. His experience in the military fueled a general pacifism that emerges in a lot of the author’s later writing.
In 1946, Harrison used the educational opportunities available to returning veterans to finish his arts education. Harrison was part of the group of young artists taking instruction from the voluble strip artist Burne Hogarth, classes that eventually evolved into the Cartoonists and Illustrators School. Among those he would later identify as classmates were Ross Andru, Tex Blaisdell, Mike Esposito, Roy Krenkel, John Severin, Al Williamson and Wally Wood. Harrison began a partnership with Wood…
Harry Harrison and Wally Wood started working for EC Comics in 1948, a story he told with great aplomb in an early-’70s interview with the crucial Graphic Story Monthly conducted by Bill Spicer and Pete Serniuk… He took credit (shared with Wood) for talking the publisher move into science fiction, where some of the line’s best work was realized, but described a lot of what he and Wood were doing as western romances. When the Wood partnership dissolved, Harrison for a time said he inherited the EC part of their one-time shared gig: one of the artists he worked with during that phase was Jules Feiffer; another was Warren Broderick. He also did work for Fawcett.Harrison shared a studio in that period with artists including Ernie Bache and Frank Frazetta. He was also a member of the briefly-lived Society Of Comic Book Illustrators organized by Bernard Krigstein. The 1950s comics scare and the industry contraction that occurred in the same, rough period, drove Harrison from comic books…
In the 1960s, Harrison began the novel series through which he is probably best remembered. The Stainless Steel Rat books focused on the thief/smuggler Slippery Jim DiGriz, the Deathworld books on culture and environmental clashes on the backdrop of a difficult-to-colonize planet, the Bill The Galactic Hero book offered up direct parodies of bad science fiction. Like many of the most popular and well-liked genre authors of the 20th Century, Harrison’s work was generally smart but offered multiple entrance points for readers of various ages. They are frequently cited by current writers and fans of science fiction and fantasy as influential books from early on in their discovery of that kind of writing.
His 1966 novel Make Room! Make Room! was the basis for the 1973 science fiction movie Soylent Green, and contains potent elements of social criticism only a few of which made it into the film version. It was dedicated to Harrison’s then-young children, which gives poignancy to the novel’s strong foreboding nature. In the 1970s, Harrison and the author Brian Aldiss worked as anthology series co-editors and were among the leaders in that corner of publishing in terms of collecting valuable material from decades past….
Much more detail at the link. And io9 has published link-heavy obits for both Kubert and Harrison.
Yutsano
Let the artists write their last, then enjoy one last sleep of the just.
karen marie
I read two of Harrison’s novels back in 2007 because I love science fiction (that genre made the 1970s for me) but I was not at all impressed with Harrison. In fact, I regretted the time spent reading those two books. Nonetheless, I am sorry he’s gone so soon (although 87 years is not a bad run) because I know others were continued to look forward to his next work.
Desert Rat
Harry Harrison was a rarity. A pacifist, his sci-fi was pretty much the polar opposite of much of the militaristic, and in the case of the much more celebrated Heinlein, almost fascist sci-fi of the 1950s and 1960s. For that alone, he should be treasured.
I particularly enjoyed the Stainless Steel Rat Series (Slippery Jim Digriz>Han Solo), the Deathworld Trilogy, and his To the Stars! series (Homeworld, Wheelworld, Starworld).
pastormaker
Harry Harrison didn’t invent soylent green. His novel “Make Room, Make Room” mentioned only soylent steaks, and those weren’t made out of people.
Human-flavored Soylent Green was a product of someone else’s imagination.
karen marie
@pastormaker: Wikipedia says it’s true.
Linda Featheringill
OT.
Mojii, the orange cat, died sometime after midnight.
He was fussy for about a half day yesterday and then found enough ease to sleep. The last time I checked on him just before bed, he was breathing but unresponsive. A couple of hours later when my daughter checked on him, he was gone.
I thought he was an old soul the first time I met him. He thought I was a good and worthy person and I never bothered to correct him.
What’s the poem? When we live with those who are more temporary than ourselves . . .
Geoduck
I have enjoyed Harrison’s work, and am sorry to see him go, but I’m not going to pull my punches: he could be spotty in terms of quality, particularly in his longer-running series. His “Best Of” short-story collection is a good introduction to his writing, if you happen across a copy.
pastormaker
@karen marie: No, it doesn’t. Soylent Green is loosely based on Harry Harrison’s great novel Make Room, Make Room.
Cannibalism was not a plot element of Harrison’s novel.
raven
@Linda Featheringill:
We who choose to surround ourselves
with lives even more temporary than our
own, live within a fragile circle;
easily and often breached.
Unable to accept its awful gaps,
we would still live no other way.
We cherish memory as the only
certain immortality, never fully
understanding the necessary plan.
— Irving Townsend
Very sorry. . .
bjacques
@Linda Featheringill: He died at home and among friends. You done good by him.
Harry Harrison. I was going to write something about him being one of a number of SF writers who came along in the 1960s when the field, especially in the US, badly needed social criticism, but that would have given short shrift to writers already providing it.
I do think Heinlein (and Paul Verhoeven) got a bad rap for “Starship Troopers.” At worst he had too high an opinion of the honesty and integrity of a military-based government. But then again he was a Navy man. But I’ve banged on about that elsewhere.
So Harry Harrison brightened the youthful years of this sci-fi geek and that’s that. I especially liked the way Harry Harrison wrapped up the Stainless Steel Rat series.
HeartlandLiberal
Any discussion of Kubert should include his run on doing the Tarzan comics of the 1970’s. He also contributed to the Conan series at points along the path of the various Conan comics’ runs.
Those are the ones that appeal to me. Classic, great work by one of the most influential artists in the history of the comic book.
Linda Featheringill
@raven:
Thank you for the poem. I’ve got a copy of it now as a Word document, should I want to refer to it in the future.
bjaques: Thank you.
I seem to be sleeping only a bit at a time right now. But that will go away with time.
satby
So sorry Linda. Mojii crossed the bridge secure in the love you and your family gave him.
Bobby Thomson
@karen marie: No, it doesn’t.
But I did learn some other things there.
Narcissus
I’m not sure how anybody could read Enemy Ace and not realize the creator was a raging pacifist.
Enemy Ace rocked.
Robert Sneddon
@Bobby Thomson: Harry knew what he was in for with Hollywood when he signed the contract for “Soylent Green”. He said the production company, created specifically for that film as most are, was called “Screw You Productions”.
He was a great guy, a big softie at heart.
rob!
I attended Joe Kubert’s school and had him as a instructor. I never talked to him all that much because I was so intimidated, having grown up (hollow laugh) on comics, and here was this legendary figure from them sitting right in front of me.
One time he put a piece of tracing paper over my drawing to show he how it could be improved, never once looking at the paper while he was talking to me–I couldn’t even follow what he was saying to me because I was so flummoxed that he never seemed to be looking at the paper he was drawing on! It was like the old trick when a ventriloquist drinks the water while the dummy talks.
He handed me the paper, which contained a chicken-scratch drawing 100x better than what I had. I still have it.
Shawn in ShowMe
The deaths of the classic comics artists seem to come in waves. We’ve lost Frank Frazetta, Al Williamson, John Severin and Joe Kubert in the last two years. Talk about living long and productive lives.
WereBear
@Linda Featheringill: So sorry to hear.
Marc McKenzie
@rob!: I never attended the Kubert school, but I did meet several graduates of the school who went onto successful careers in comics. I met Joe a couple of years ago at a dinner, and like you, I was intimidated at first–until I actually spoke to him. He was a generous, great guy, and even though he was into his 80s he looked a lot younger.
The best thing about Joe was that he kept drawing comics, even up to the end. And his work never flagged, never wavered. It was always top-notch (and makes my own work look like absolute s**t).
Aaron Baker
Loved Enemy Ace as a kid; liked Sgt. Rock.
I can’t remember reading much by Harry Harrison–but he was an excellent anthologist, and I happily read my way through a number of his collections.
Scott P.
It’s sad so few seem to know Harry Harrison, a truly great writer. Not mentioned yet are his books “Montezuma’s Revenge” and “Queen Victoria’s Revenge”, which I enjoyed greatly as a teenager.
ShadeTail
I’ve read a few books in Harrison’s Stainless Steel Rat series, and you can see the definite improvement from the earlier works to the later ones. He clearly became a much better writer as he went along.
ThresherK
@Linda Featheringill: Sincerest condolences.
And, on topic, XTC. Andy certainly seemed to get Kubert’s vibe.
Ann Marie
Thanks for this post. I love the Stainless Steel Rat series and I’m a huge fan of Joe Kubert. I might have missed their obits otherwise.
And Linda, I’m so sorry about Mojii. Even though we know we only have them for a short time, it’s so difficult to say goodbye.
DFH no.6
I know they’re not high literary art like, say, Faulkner or Proust or something, but I loved Harrison’s Deathworld books when I first read them as a young lad in the 60s, and I’ve enjoyed re-reading them a couple more times over the years since (last time just two years ago, before I gave them to my son to read).
In the meantime I’ve read widely across many genres (including the aforementioned Faulkner and Proust) and I still regard the Deathworld Trilogy with the greatest fondness.
Maybe it’s something like your first kiss, who knows?
RIP Harry – 87 years was a good long trip.
And LInda F: sorry for your loss. I love all my furry children (those gone and those still here) as much as I love anything.
The Rainbow Bridge never fails to bring tears to my eyes. I’m an atheist with no illusions about any “afterlife”, but if I ruled the Universe the Rainbow Bridge would be a prominent feature (along with utter destruction of all fascists, long as I’m fantasizing).
Diana
while we’re on the topic of Harry Harrison, may I recommend his novella “Planet of the Damned”? I liked it, but mostly I liked the underlying theme that hostility is a self-fulfilling prophecy: behave as if the planet is against you, and it will be.
I never liked the stainless steel rat. It was too 50’s americana, not very imaginative in terms of the SF, and without enough fantasy Slippery Jim was just a weak and not-very-clever version of the talented Mr. Ripley. The story has to be a fantasy for a reason, not just because you can’t be bothered to work your way around all the obstacles you would face if your cons were here on earth.
will try the deathworld series thanks to everyone here. Never read them.