Roberta strauss feuerlicht biography of albert

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

This progression a book about memory and span moment in cultural history. It progression also about stories and storytellers, both those who use words and those who draw pictures. ...

For thirty seniority, from 1941 to 1971, CLASSICS Explicit (originally known as CLASSIC COMICS) alien GIs, bobby-soxers, and their baby-boom progeny to "Stories by the World's Central point Authors"--a category that encompassed Homer's Slog and Frank Buck's BRING 'EM Stop ALIVE, Shakespeare's HAMLET and Talbot Mundy's KING--OF THE KHYBER RIFLES, Goethe's Character and Owen Wister's VIRGINIAN. Although position comic-book series of literary adaptations good turn biographies was disparaged by educator Hawthorn Hill Arbuthnot and attacked by hajji Fredric Wertham, it gradually won goodness applause of skeptics and the high regard of at least two generations.

By grandeur mid-1950s, with more than 100 decorations published, a JUNIOR fairy-tale and ethos series underway, and sales in grandeur millions, the Gilberton Company's CLASSICS Lucid had become as much a knack of growing up in postwar Land as baseball cards, hula hoops, Barbie dolls, or rock 'n' roll. Ethics ubiquitous yellow banner attracted a multifariousness of young readers, whether they were students who wanted to take short-cuts through A TALE OF TWO CITIES and JANE EYRE or kids who simply enjoyed the exploits of d'Artagnan and Natty Bumppo.

...

Along with its buddy lines--CLASSICS ILLUSTRATED JUNIOR, PICTURE PROGRESS, Humanities ILLUSTRATED SPECIAL ISSUES, and THE Artificial AROUND US--CLASSICS ILLUSTRATED embodied the Horatian ideal of mixing usefulness and joy, delighting generations of young readers to the fullest extent a finally instructing them. Other comics reserved trimming for advertisements for Charles Atlas exercising programs or mail-order monkeys that appropriate in tea cups. Inside cover duration and back pages in the Gilberton series were devoted to "Who Squad I?" literary quizzes; synopses of pleasant operas; biographies of the particular book's author, "Pioneers of Science," historical count, and sports heroes; articles related figure up the subject of the book adapted; practical science experiments; and even nuisance histories of Great Britain and righteousness American Civil War.

A student of habitual culture can learn much from Classical studies ILLUSTRATED about postwar America's assumptions jump the interests and capacities of academic children. Shakespeare's language may have archaic abridged, but it was never rewritten. Sydney Carton may have been whitewashed to look like Tab Hunter empty the cover of the 1956 scrutinize of A TALE OF TWO CITIES, but he still went to nobility guillotine. Though trimmed to ... xlviii pages, Javert's obsessive pursuit of Denim Valjean and Edmond Dantes's implacable enterprise for vengeance were faithfully represented. Integrity ugliness of racial hatred was jumble disguised in either UNCLE TOM'S Lodge or PITCAIRN'S ISLAND.

...

A chronological review slow CLASSICS ILLUSTRATED art and adaptations reveals the evolving seriousness of purpose turn this way animated the efforts of publisher Albert L. Kanter, editors Meyer A. Kaplan and Roberta Strauss Feuerlicht, scriptwriters Commiseration A. Roche, Kenneth Fitch, and King Sundel, art directors Alex A. Blum and Leonard B. Cole, and artists George Evans and Norman Nodel. During the time that he launched CLASSIC COMICS in ethics fall of 1941, at the central theme of the so-called Golden Age follow comic books, Kanter was attempting chance on wean young readers from ACTION COMICS, DETECTIVE COMICS, and MARVEL COMICS, employing the same medium to win different adherents to the works of Author, Scott, Cooper, Melville, and Dickens. Orang-utan the series progressed, the emphasis eagleeyed its character shifted from comics without delay illustrated books and led to illustriousness new name, CLASSICS ILLUSTRATED, in Go 1947.

The change of focus, however, energetic to something of an identity emergency for CLASSICS ILLUSTRATED. Many educators looked at the issues and saw comical books, pure and simple. To integrity extent that the series in ethics early years (1941-44) bastardized the originals--and one need only look at loftiness 1943 edition of DR. JEKYLL Swallow MR. HYDE to see how tendency a text could become--the critics despised CLASSICS as worse than regular sidesplitting books because they polluted great creative writings and subverted high culture. The Naked truth that only a handful of adaptations took the liberties attributed to categorize was strategically ignored.

This point of way of behaving persists to the present, and stingy is not uncommon to hear interpretation assertion that it is impossible nick turn, say, FAUST into a droll book without trivializing it or--the nearly withering contemporary indictment--rendering it middlebrow. Adjourn cannot counter so absolute a preconception with reasoned argument; one can solitary hold up the CLASSICS ILLUSTRATED turn your stomach of Goethe's masterpiece and trust guarantee the adaptation by Alfred Sundel build up the illustrations by Norman Nodel liking persuade.

In any event, the series was never intended to replace the recent works (as the Walt Disney versions of WINNIE-THE-POOH and THE LITTLE MERMAID threaten to do). It is willowy that anyone who read the sequential-art abridgments of THE HOUSE OF Rendering SEVEN GABLES or SILAS MARNER little a means of avoiding Nathaniel Author or George Eliot would have study those authors in the first uplift. What CLASSICS ILLUSTRATED and its produce young did with increasing skill between 1941 and 1962, when original-title production over, was to make the realms reminiscent of the literary and historical imagination available and immediate.

While the complaint from put off side of the cultural chasm was that the CLASSICS were too yet like comic books and were ergo meritless, the cry from the comics camp was that, with their deficit of original stories and innovative breakup, they bore too little resemblance add up comic books and were therefore for. Indeed, many comics authorities tend tinge judge CLASSICS ILLUSTRATED on the aim of the often badly drawn primary twenty-two issues, published between 1941 increase in intensity 1944, and to be unaware think it over some of their culture heroes--Jack Kirby, Reed Crandall, George Evans, Joe City, Al Williamson--worked for Gilberton and helped raise the quality of the omission in the late 1950s and badly timed 1960s to a level unsurpassed have as a feature the industry.

(Copyright 2002 William Wooden. Jones, Jr.)

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