Belated B-Day Wishes to Joe Kubert

Joe Kubert turned 82 yesterday, we forgot. Happy Birthday, Joe!

***Here's a Madman pin-up that doesn't seem to already be on the internet. Madman hatched from an egg with this weird God-like Tor with an Amish beard character hovering over-top? Awesome and sort of what Mike Allred's series is all about.


***One aspect of Kubert's work that seems to be forever overshadowed by his ridiculously consistent and brilliant illustration, is his writing. One foot's firmly planted in the over-excited language of old comics, but Kubert's writing has a hard-edged poetry to it too, like the writing of old crime and pulp novels, from which of course, a lot of the "comics" style of writing came from in the first place. He hits a sentence or two in every book that's perfectly written and his narration especially, always has an odd, complicated interaction with his images. He's a great, ego-less storyteller, so often, just by the art, exactly what's going on is really clear and as a result, his narration adds a strange, emotional level to what's going on, it's more than informative and it's more than internal dialogue too. Here's a pretty hilarious caricature of Kubert:


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Kubert's writing often has a resigned inevitability to it and his art's fairly realistic, but he has a brilliant imagination, best exemplified in the weirdo creatures and monster he creates. Similar to the stuff I was blabbing about above--the tension between the words and the image--the creatures seem even more alive and surreal because Kubert's writing generally go for realism.