Another bright, shiny apple in the cornucopia of the 1960s comic page was Apartment 3-G (1961-2015).
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| Kotzky and his son, Brian, who would eventually take over the strip |
Kotzky spent years illustrating comic books, advertisements for the renowned ad agency Johnstone and Cushing before serving as a ghost artist on strips as varied as Steve Canyon and Juliet Jones, he finally landed his own syndicated strip, Apartment 3-G, and from that moment on he worked like a dog for the privilege.
The best history of Apartment 3-G and the other photorealistic strips of the era was Prof Mendez's beautifully written The Look of Love: The Rise and Fall of the Photo-Realistic Newspaper Strip, 1946-1970. In it, Mendez describes Kotzky's exhausting work process:
Kotzky would rough out the week from the script given to him by Dallis then would go off to find "the right reference files," four layers in all. The first layer was the use of celebrity photographs--celebrities because of the ample supply available--for faces. Whenever a new guest star was introduced, Kotzky would spend considerable time finding the right actor to cast then developing how his version of the character would appear in his strip, his vibrant line masking the identity of the real person used. The second layer was instant photographs for body positions, the animation of the gesture into story, drafting family and friends for posing duty. Brian noted his father didn't deviate from using the camera until the very end of the strip. The third layer, mostly for women, was the transposition of the latest fashions from glossy magazines, necessary because the girls always had to look stylish and up to date. The fourth and final layer was the use of photo scrap for concrete details-- telephones, lamps, desks, purses and briefcases, stairways and mailboxes.
It's no wonder that Kotzky's son recalled, "As far back as I can remember, Dad did nothing but work. No vacations, no hobbies, no sitting around reading the Sunday paper--it was a life spent at the drawing board." Kotzky died with an uncompleted Sunday page still on his drawing board.
Like every other illustrator who worked in the 1950s, Kotzky seems to have studied the great Al Parker's treatment of women:
Apartment 3G was never quite in the same league with the very top strips, such as Alex Raymond's Rip Kirby or Leonard Starr's On Stage, but that's not my point. It was a smartly drawn, tasteful strip which year after year, demonstrated skill and craftsmanship. There is no strip that comes close to it on the newspaper comic pages today.
Comics pages in the 1960s were overflowing with fine drawings. A young boy who couldn't afford 12 cents for a comic book could still receive a fresh gallery of free drawings every day. He could observe and learn from their use of line, their compositions, their solutions to problems, their anatomy lessons. He might even cut out the strips he liked and carefully preserve them in a special shoebox. Then one day in 2022 he might take them out again and fondle them, a little surprised by how they (and he) have turned brittle with age.
Sadly, this is what Apartment 3-G looked like when it finally crawled across the finish line in 2015:
As Shakespeare said, “sans teeth, sans eyes, sans taste, sans everything.”
Young children who love pictures have to turn elsewhere for inspiration and guidance these days. This school is closed.
18 comments:
Fantastic artwork on this strip!
Great posting! Brings back great memories of my reading the comics page while eating multiple bowls of Cheerios when I was a kid in the mid-60's. . Dondi, Judge Parker, Buzz Sawyer, Winnie Winkle -- right down the left side and up to the right and down again. Apt 3 G was a bit adult for me, but was smack in the middle of the page where the drawing excelled after the simpler stuff. I loved the drawings of the "realistic" strips. The "Mr. Gregory calling" is a fantasitc frame.
How about some Al Williamson ?
Now do Mary Perkins. That strip bowled me over when I encountered it a few years ago. Leonard Starr has immense storytelling, visual staging and dialogue skills, understated yet flawless drawing that grows on you, and great entertainment value. Mary Perkins is one of the top achievements of comic strip history. Starr is almost never flashy in the way Kotzky, Drake or Alex Raymond often are, but the quality level is fantastically high throughout.
I always liked Apt. 3-G, but I don't think I fully appreciated the excellence of the drawing at the time. I never saw the strip during its final days--my god, it looks like a bad parody of Sally Forth.
Never saw this strip before. Strong drawings, especially on those two strips with the raven with the bobbed haircut. I like the Madeline Kahn caricature in the first bunch. The early ones in your post seem a bit disjointed, very 'influenced' by Drucker and Toth; so I'd say he may have had a 'fifth layer' of reference. (I'm 100% sure I've seen the curly-haired girl's image in the second panel in the first strip you posted. Possibly it is lifted from Drucker.)
The Sunday strip looks like a different artist. Possibly it was ghosted?
The end of the strip is dire. Looks like it was drawn on an iphone with a finger during a subway ride by a tiktok-er.
Like Robert Cosgrove, perhaps in the past I also didn't fully get how skilled Alex Kotzky was, but looking through these well-chosen panels there is an easy grace and natural sweep to his linework that reminds me of another featured artist in Prof Mendez's exceptional graphical essay, Paul Gillon (13 Rue de l'Espoir, others).
The detail is in what Kotzky suggests as much as in what is fully rendered, as in the panel of the girl yawning, or the man taking off his overcoat: brisk economical inklines that capture everything in the scene and never leave you guessing as to object, place, or intent.
What it devolved into at the end is truly sad; not just for the obvious artistic chasm between Kotzky's original vision and what is finally seen here, but also for the decline in Frank Bolle's late period work, which is a far cry from the workmanlike stint he did on other strips, including The Heart of Juliet Jones (1989-2000).
The Prof. Mendez link shows up as dead on my side; while not a fully intact version, archive.org has a web snapshot of what David references from that incredible site on Apartment 3G:
https://web.archive.org/web/20040404073139/http://profmendez.tripod.com/html/apart3G.htm
T-- Glad you like them. That's why I think such work deserves whatever new audiences the internet can provide.
Paul-- I think the Cheerios have remained the same but everything else has changed. I wonder if kids read the newspaper comic page today the way you and I once did. It used to be a stepping stone to literacy, as we graduated at our own pace from the "simpler stuff" like Dondi to the more complex stuff like Apartment 3G. Then of course Sesame Street came along. I think we gained some things and lost some things in the exchange.
Al McLuckie-- I wasn't sure whether to do Secret Agent Corrigan but if a long time participant in these discussions has an interest, I'll do that next. I'll be interested to hear whether your reaction to Williamson is the same as mine.
Anonymous-- You're speaking my language. Long time readers know that Starr is one of my very favorites; I think his words and pictures were both brilliant, and as you note his drawings were rarely flashy or gimmicky. He was the epitome of integrity, at least until the mid 1970s when readership was down, the size was diminished, and popular tastes were changing from thoughtful and complex to dumb and simplistic.
I thought readers here would be tired of me talking about Starr's work, but since you've given me an opening I'll gladly jump right in.
Robert Cosgrove-- A good analogy, although I'm not sure it's being fair to Sally Forth. There were actually blogs that followed the ending of Apt. 3-G the way you might visit a relative who had become feeble minded. http://ladiesofapartment3g.blogspot.com/2015/11/so-smile-and-move-on.html . You loved them, but you didn't expect too much of them, and you kept a sense of humor about their nonsensical mewlings.
Kev Ferrara-- I agree with your assessments, especially about a "fifth layer" of reference. I liked the face of that curly haired girl, but it never occurred to me that it might be because Kotzky was looking at a Drucker. As for a ghost artist, there's a pretty good record now of when a ghost stepped in on most of these strips. It seems that there was so much work to be done, everyone had to rely on a ghost artist from time to tine to help them out of a jam. Neal Adams once ghosted Juliet Jones for Stan Drake, and when Leonard Starr broke his leg his friend Thomas Sawyer stepped in to help him out for a couple of weeks. But mostly my sense is that the artists on these serious strips were so grateful to be syndicated (and to make so much more money than they did in comic books) that they worked like dogs on their strips for years, before the charm and the glamour finally wore thin. Then they became a lot less proprietary and viewed the strip as a business. Many of them subcontracted out to whoever could keep the franchise going for them.
Hey , at least I didn't request Johnny Comet by whatsis name . I always feel like I learn something from your thoughts on art whether it coincides with mine or not .
My sense is that the artists on these serious strips were so grateful to be syndicated (and to make so much more money than they did in comic books) that they worked like dogs on their strips for years, before the charm and the glamour finally wore thin. Then they became a lot less proprietary and viewed the strip as a business. Many of them subcontracted out to whoever could keep the franchise going for them.
Understood.
I was deeply impressed - when researching Frank Godwin for SofI - that he had died at his drawing board working on Rusty Riley strips that were at the exact same quality as those of a decade earlier. Like Orson Welles dying at his typewriter. Not a bad way to go.
Speaking of Al Williamson, one of the earliest stories he did for Warren's Creepy magazine (circa ~1964) was a story about a nasty, conniving comic strip artist who had 3 different artists doing ghost work on his strip - creating the entire strip themselves it turns out - each without knowing of the others. He works them hard to get way ahead on the strip. But then they get wind of what's going on. So he deadlines them to make sure they don't spill the ink, dumps the bodies. But then, de rigueur mortis, the 3 dead ghosts zombie back into his studio and gruesomely 'put him in the strip' at the end. Always wondered who inspired the symbolic vengeance of that story. Williamson had worked for John Prentice, but I believe Prentice was considered a good person and taught Williamson a great deal.
Obviously Al Capp trying to cut his best ghost Frazetta's rate in half is a fairly well known story of comic strip conniving. Gil Kane was also known for overfarming, but that may have been later.
Regarding that Williamson story I always thought it might have been based on Warren and maybe his EC buddies Meglin and Torres ,
Vannderwolff-- Thanks very much for the correction on the link to Prof Mendez's loving tribute. I was trying to link to the full archive, not just the Apartment 3-G version and I obviously flubbed it. I agree with your assessment of both Kotzky and Bolle. Bolle did yeoman work backing up a number of the top strip artists, but by the time Apartment 3-G ended Bolle was well into his 90s. A number of people have noted the tragedy of comic artists dying at their drawing boards, but there's a kind of pathos to artists staying at their drawing boards too long.
Kev Ferrara-- Agreed, and I look forward to reading what you had to say about Frank Godwin.
I LOVE Williamson's story of Baldo Smudge, the conniving comic strip artist, and we invoke his name regularly around our house. It was one of Williamson's and Archie Goodwin's best stories for Warren, I think. I was listening to someone talk with Neal Adams at his booth at Comic-Con and the person mentioned the name Baldo Smudge.
Adams perked right up. He clearly knew the story and the scuttlebutt behind it. With a big smile he said, "That was Don Sherwood who owned the strip Dan Flagg." Apparently Williamson and Goodwin ghosted the drawing and the writing on Dan Flagg, while Sherwood went around collecting medals and tributes for his great patriotism in his realistic strip about a Marine.
In defense of the ending of the strip: It was last handled by Frank Bolle who was getting on in years -- he was in his 90s IIRC. The writing was great if one enjoyed surrealistic non-sequiturs, otherwise...
Now, the mystery is why the strip was even continued to that point. They were still running it long after it should have ended.
I LOVE Williamson's story of Baldo Smudge
Ha, yes! Baldo Smudge!
That was Don Sherwood who owned the strip Dan Flagg.
Well, that was easy! Glad I asked.
The Rules of Attraction archived is missing a lot of images. I downloaded my own version a few years ago and uploaded it to my Google Drive. Just download, unzip and click on the index.html to open.
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1GQKmqSy4H9VkgglVTxEnElh_PkTvFj0a/view?usp=sharing
Frank Bolle continuing into his 90s, after his sure hand had left him, is a sad tale of a cartoonist doing low paying work-for-hire his entire career.
King Features is (was?) known for continuing strips past their time of profitability to keep the cartoonists working and making a small stipend. Give 'em credit for that.
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