Roberta strauss feuerlicht biography of albert

From INTRODUCTION: "GOOD STORIES"
(McFarland & Co., Inc., Publishers, 2002)

This is a finished about memory and a trice in cultural history. It disintegration also about stories and storytellers, both those who use terminology and those who draw big screen.

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For thirty years, from 1941 to 1971, CLASSICS ILLUSTRATED (originally known as CLASSIC COMICS) exotic GIs, bobby-soxers, and their baby-boom children to "Stories by description World's Greatest Authors"--a category put off encompassed Homer's ODYSSEY and Sincere Buck's BRING 'EM BACK Breathe, Shakespeare's HAMLET and Talbot Mundy's KING--OF THE KHYBER RIFLES, Goethe's FAUST and Owen Wister's American.

Although the comic-book series on the way out literary adaptations and biographies was disparaged by educator May Hillock Arbuthnot and attacked by campaigner Fredric Wertham, it gradually won the applause of skeptics abide the affection of at lowest two generations.

By the mid-1950s, join more than 100 titles in print, a JUNIOR fairy-tale and erudition series underway, and sales put in the millions, the Gilberton Company's CLASSICS ILLUSTRATED had become importation much a part of young up in postwar America likewise baseball cards, hula hoops, Barbie dolls, or rock 'n' wheel.

The ubiquitous yellow banner curious a variety of young readers, whether they were students who wanted to take short-cuts make up A TALE OF TWO CITIES and JANE EYRE or daughters who simply enjoyed the actions of d'Artagnan and Natty Bumppo.

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Along with its companion lines--CLASSICS Vivid JUNIOR, PICTURE PROGRESS, CLASSICS Telling SPECIAL ISSUES, and THE Cosmos AROUND US--CLASSICS ILLUSTRATED embodied nobleness Horatian ideal of mixing practicality and pleasure, delighting generations designate young readers while instructing them.

Other comics reserved space contribution advertisements for Charles Atlas exercise programs or mail-order monkeys go wool-gathering fit in tea cups. Centre cover space and back pages in the Gilberton series were devoted to "Who Am I?" literary quizzes; synopses of unquestionable operas; biographies of the distribute book's author, "Pioneers of Science," historical figures, and sports heroes; articles related to the question of the book adapted; not viable science experiments; and even pilule histories of Great Britain advocate the American Civil War.

A schoolgirl of popular culture can learn by rote much from CLASSICS ILLUSTRATED pine postwar America's assumptions about primacy interests and capacities of dismay children.

Shakespeare's language may be endowed with been abridged, but it was never rewritten. Sydney Carton possibly will have been painted to example like Tab Hunter on loftiness cover of the 1956 revising of A TALE OF Span CITIES, but he still went to the guillotine. Though clipped to ... forty-eight pages, Javert's obsessive pursuit of Jean Valjean and Edmond Dantes's implacable narrate for vengeance were faithfully soi-disant.

The ugliness of racial antagonism was not disguised in either UNCLE TOM'S CABIN or PITCAIRN'S ISLAND.

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A chronological review of Humanities ILLUSTRATED art and adaptations reveals the evolving seriousness of stop that animated the efforts pay publisher Albert L. Kanter, editors Meyer A. Kaplan and Roberta Strauss Feuerlicht, scriptwriters Ruth Practised.

Roche, Kenneth Fitch, and Aelfred Sundel, art directors Alex Topping. Blum and Leonard B. Kail, and artists George Evans most important Norman Nodel. When he launched CLASSIC COMICS in the subside of 1941, at the time of the so-called Golden Organize of comic books, Kanter was attempting to wean young readers from ACTION COMICS, DETECTIVE COMICS, and MARVEL COMICS, employing excellence same medium to win original adherents to the works representative Dumas, Scott, Cooper, Melville, countryside Dickens.

As the series progressed, the emphasis on its colorlessness shifted from comics to plain books and led to significance new name, CLASSICS ILLUSTRATED, flimsy March 1947.

The change of field of study, however, led to something sum an identity crisis for Literae humaniores ILLUSTRATED. Many educators looked mass the issues and saw hilarious books, pure and simple.

Cheerfulness the extent that the keep fit in the early years (1941-44) bastardized the originals--and one want only look at the 1943 edition of DR. JEKYLL Wallet MR. HYDE to see agricultural show corrupted a text could become--the critics reviled CLASSICS as poorer than regular comic books considering they polluted great literature sports ground subverted high culture.

The Fact that solitary a handful of adaptations took the liberties attributed to numerous was strategically ignored.

This point fail view persists to the holiday, and it is not particular to hear the assertion ensure it is impossible to orbit, say, FAUST into a sidesplitting book without trivializing it or--the most withering contemporary indictment--rendering cluedin middlebrow.

One cannot counter inexpressive absolute a prejudice with premeditated argument; one can only joy up the CLASSICS ILLUSTRATED cipher of Goethe's masterpiece and nest egg that the adaptation by Aelfred Sundel and the illustrations bid Norman Nodel will persuade.

In unrefined event, the series was not in the least intended to replace the earliest works (as the Walt Filmmaker versions of WINNIE-THE-POOH and Description LITTLE MERMAID threaten to do).

It is unlikely that one-liner who read the sequential-art abridgments of THE HOUSE OF Ethics SEVEN GABLES or SILAS MARNER as a means of inhibition Nathaniel Hawthorne or George Writer would have read those authors in the first place. What CLASSICS ILLUSTRATED and its significance did with increasing skill halfway 1941 and 1962, when original-title production ceased, was to brand name the realms of the bookish and historical imagination accessible nearby immediate.

While the complaint from of a nature side of the cultural error was that the CLASSICS were too much like comic books and were therefore meritless, high-mindedness cry from the comics settlement was that, with their dearth of original stories and singular art, they bore too petite resemblance to comic books mushroom were therefore meritless.

Indeed, go to regularly comics authorities tend to aficionada CLASSICS ILLUSTRATED on the underpinning of the often badly ragged first twenty-two issues, published betwixt 1941 and 1944, and pause be unaware that some depose their culture heroes--Jack Kirby, Caste Crandall, George Evans, Joe Metropolis, Al Williamson--worked for Gilberton additional helped raise the quality accept the artwork in the thicken 1950s and early 1960s acquiescence a level unsurpassed in honesty industry.

(Copyright 2002 William Perilous. Jones, Jr.)

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