In the early1960s a flurry of coloring books appeared with grown up content. Don't ask me why.
Like children's coloring books, they were printed on cheap pulp paper with simple line drawings suitable for coloring in with crayon. Each page might contain a sentence or two of very simple language, like a child's primer.
The first major example was The JFK Coloring Book illustrated by Mort Drucker. It was intended as a cheap novelty item but it unexpectedly became a smash hit. It sold out multiple printings and spent weeks on the bestseller lists. It was covered widely in the press, including Time Magazine and Newsweek. The Smithsonian Institution bought a copy for its collection.
The JFK Coloring Book was quite profitable for the authors (not so much for the artist). Immediately, numerous imitators stampeded into the market. Artist Jack Davis quickly illustrated a coloring book about Soviet boss Nikita Khruschev:
Drucker was called back for an encore performance with another coloring book about the Kennedy administration.
The same year, artist Shel Silverstein produced the wicked Uncle Shelby's ABZ book, using child-like drawings and language but again, definitely intended for adults.
The glut of coloring books soon saturated the market, and the demand subsided. Illustrators packed up their tents and wandered off looking for the next big thing.
Twenty five years later there were a couple of half- hearted attempts at reviving the market, including the Ollie North Coloring Book and The Ronald Regan Coloring Book, both illustrated by Mort Drucker. The drawings were more sophisticated and the covers were now in color but by this time the moment for such coloring books had passed.
It's difficult to explain the appeal in the '60s of putting adult content in a child-like format. Mark Twain effectively showed the adult world through the eyes of an innocent youth in Huckleberry Finn. In the 1950s, Charles Schulz's strip Peanuts put adult messages in the mouths of small, simply drawn children. Perhaps these coloring books were a continuation of that device. In any event, that fad-- like so many others in the history of illustration-- came and went, leaving some nice pictures behind.
20 comments:
Nice likeness of the prophet Mohammad between the secretaries of State and Defense.
A nice bit of history from JFK to now. Humor is so sour now but the Silverstein humor still works, even the drawings are still good..
I love Mort Drucker, but for me, nobody tops the gloriously zany Jack Davis.
They're both great, Drucker's rich renderings are a feast. But neither has the bile and viciousness of a great editorial cartoonist. As political cartoons - and all drawings of politicians are, even if dressed up as coloring books - this is really tepid stuff.
Drucker is as good as it gets. Everything is drawn well, in style, fresh, buoyantly, and with gentle humor.
I like that Silverstein gag about encouraging kids to get into the TV with a hammer to see the elves. Reminds me of Soupy Sales' suspension from his radio program a few years later; for suggesting his young audience send him the silly green pieces of paper found in their parents' wallets.
Happy Fourth of July!
That's the Ayatollah Khomeini between the secretaries of State and Defense.
that was the ruse
Coloring books for adults came back in fashion in a major way around 2013, and remain popular to this day. Nowadays they lean more towards decorative patterns than topical illustrations (the selling point for many are as a way to detach from a stressful world), but still, if you add the sitting president to a search on Amazon, you get several hundred hits falling in two distinct partisan camps. Predictably, a large proportion are obviously AI-generated.
One of the art editors for MAD magazine told me that the difference between parodies drawn by Jack Davis and parodies drawn by Mort Drucker was that Davis did a conscientious job of achieving a likeness on the splash page, then coasted for the rest of the story with loose, casual approximations, while Drucker stuck to it all the way to the end. Just one of the reasons that Bill Gaines paid Drucker more than any other MAD artist.
Anonymous wrote: "Coloring books for adults came back in fashion in a major way around 2013."
I've seen some of those later coloring books, which seem to have a very different purpose. The geometric patterns, where the game is simply to color within the lines, seem to be the equivalent of therapy in mental institutions. There are also sexually oriented coloring books and connect the dot books which seem like an attempt to refresh sex with a child-like game after coarse and explicit materials have become universally accessible. None of them are drawn well, which is of course my major interest here.
Yeah, they were originally marketed as "Mandalas", to combat stress.
I've also seen pre-AI bootleg children's coloring books which just lifted random images from internet and ran them though photoshop, including an image of a Ben10 posing for the camera with a clearly pregnant Gwen.
As Kev Ferrara said, Happy 4th of July to everyone (including our friends in the UK-- I hope there are no hard feelings.)
Thanks David, and no hard feeling from me, someone's got to tell us how it is!
On the colouring books, I guess it's just too sophisticated for the generation of Disney Adults...
Jack Davis was always both the workhorse and the race horse in the EC stable. Sometimes he would get jobs from Gaines and do them out in his car on Lafayette Street. Wouldn't even wait to get home to his studio. Then he would walk back inside to turn in the work, and get another assignment. Frazetta begged him to slow down so he would produce more of the finer work of which he was capable. But, at the end of the day, it is the unbridled freewheeling energy of Davis' work that keeps it feeling joyful into eternity. By not being refined, he kept himself happy as well as everybody else who loved and continues to love his work.
What a wonderful story. You made my day.
I've heard similar stories about Davis-- once when he was on a fishing trip he was notified of another opportunity to do a spot illustration, so he knocked it off in minutes using the light from his car headlights and the water from his fishing stream.
His choices were odd-- his work was everywhere because he'd never turn away the crummiest little job for the smallest little flea bitten client, yet he did have remorse about his EC horror work and his pictures with nudity for Playboy. He stopped doing such work.
I agree with Frazetta-- when Davis was really applying himself, his work was absolutely superb. When he got lazy or sloppy, his work was always OK (as Kev says, it still had a "joyful" feel to it) but he would have a very different legacy today if he'd held himself to a higher standard. Some of that stuff he should not have let out the door.
Dave,
But then he wouldn’t have been Jack Davis.
Movieac-- True, but wouldn't it be nice to be Jack Davis+++? I just remembered that many years ago I wrote something about this topic, with some examples of what I viewed as examples of Davis' lesser work: https://illustrationart.blogspot.com/2007/07/counting-to-nine.html
Thanks for that Davis link. Even if his refusal to say 'no' sometimes affected his standards, I just love his work no matter what…his charm is unmatched. I've been trying to read through all your entries, and your dedication to this blog since 2006 is seriously impressive, Dave. Great stuff!
Movieac-- Thanks for the very kind words. Engaging with you folks on these topics has been good therapy for me on the side.
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