[Joe Kubert How To Draw From Life Pdf Download
Berry Spitsberg
Kubert is a paradigmatic member of his time and place. His parents were immigrants, and he has the gratitude toward America and the respect of middle-class virtue characterized by the children of immigrants, as well as the optimism suffused in those who benefited from the post-WWII economic boom. Unsurprisingly, he respects professionalism as much as he accepts the parameters of his profession; these values doubtlessly correspond to those of his generation, and therein lies an education to the modern reader.
KUBERT: Yeah, well, to really give a better explanation, both my parents worked. My mother ran a restaurant, and in the back of the restaurant were three rooms in which I, and my four sisters, lived with my mother and father. My father was a kosher butcher. He went to work in his store, which was maybe five or six blocks from home. That was in east New York, in Brooklyn, where I grew up.
KUBERT: Both my parents were from Poland, and I was born in Poland. My mother was pregnant with me the first time they made the attempt to come to the United States back in 1926 and, because she was pregnant, they would not permit her to go on the ship until she gave birth. So they returned to their home in Poland. I was two months old when they went back to the ship in South Hampton, England, and finally came to America. So I was about two months old when I got to the United States.
Anyhow, Harry figured that this was a good way to make a buck. He could package comic books if he could get enough artists and some writers together. Letterers. And service all these publishers in a business that just started to bloom.
KUBERT: It sounds like a cartoon gag, but they tell me that it really happened. Let me describe Harry to you: He was a short, heavyset guy with a perpetual cigar in his mouth. Always wore a hat. Always wore a suit with a tie and vest. He would chew a cigar back and forth as he was talking to you and he would have one hand in his vest pocket with the jacket pulled back. He looked like a promoter.
KUBERT: The shop was one large room. The room was probably the size of this area here, about 40 by 30 feet. There were perhaps eight or 10 artists at drafting tables. There were windows on one side, as I recall it, looking out on 23rd Street. Two or three of the better artists sat by the window. Everyone else suffered inside the room. I sat the furthest from the windows. My table was way in the back of the room.
But going back to the look of the place, it was in an old tenement type of building. The wooden floors creaked as you walked. There was dust everywhere from the cracks in the wood as you walked. The windows were wide open in the summer. As for air conditioning, forget it. It was hot as hell in the place. Nobody seemed to mind, though. We sat and did our work. Nobody complained. Not that I can remember, anyhow.
KUBERT: No. Every artist did a complete job. Even over at MLJ, Meskin never had anybody ink his stuff. They completed all the work themselves. The only one who allowed a little inking I guess was Bob Montana. The small amount of stuff I did for him. That was not a regular job. It was because he was in a hole and needed some immediate help on his deadline. So I inked a story. But it was not a steady job by any means.
But I would ignore a good deal of what he told me. Naturally, a lot did sink in. The points that he made were cogent and right. He had the patience to put them across consistently. Eventually he saw his suggestions coming out in my drawings. In fact I did heed his words and I think my ability to draw and to tell a story improved markedly.
KUBERT: Yes. As I mentioned before. Shelly was wonderful to me. Shelly withstood my dalliances as far as deadlines were concerned and was patient with me. And he loved the business. He loved drawing. His Scribbly was, of course, an autobiography and the biography of most people who wanted to get into the business at that time, especially if you were very young. I could see myself as Scribbly. Maybe that was why Shelly was so understanding. Because he saw the same things in me that he created in the Scribbly strip.
KUBERT:I can only gauge by my own experiences. It was very rare that I would even meet publishers. They were on a higher level. They were the money guys. They were the guys who dealt with the bankers, with lawyers. Not with the schleps who were doing the cartoon drawing work for the publications. I understand Shelly had a good relationship with M.C. Gaines and often talked with and about him. For me, Gaines was this guy in the clouds. Very few of the artists, even Lee Elias or Irwin Hasen, ever had the opportunity to meet or talk to Gaines.
KUBERT: Yeah. Well, Shelly was no longer there as editor. He had led me around by my hand, so to speak, and made sure that I was busy, that I got the work. With Shelly gone, I had to make my own way. Whit Ellsworth was the editor at DC. He too was a very nice guy. But an older guy and not an artist. Strictly a business kind of guy. He was the editor.
GROTH: Now, you might not know the answer to this, but can probably take a better guess at it than most: do you think the assembly line method was initiated because of production needs? There were people who could pencil faster ...
KUBERT: Yes. It was Lou Fine, Alex Kotzky, Gil Fox, and myself. Somebody was doing the lettering. There were just four people in a small office in Stamford, Connecticut. My summer vacation consisted of taking the subway train from Brooklyn to Grand Central Station, then taking the train up to Stamford, Connecticut, over two hours each way. Every day. I never stayed over. That was the first time I ever ate an un-kosher meal [laughs].
And you find out later that somebody read that story and actually felt the thing that you drew. When I first came into this business, I never dreamed that my work was read beyond the next block. I was doing it because I loved to do it. I really like to see the characters in my head appear in graphic and pictorial form. And when I learned that people around the world get the same effects, it was like having whipped cream put on top of the cake.
KUBERT: No. Much more regimented. No wrestling or fooling around. After all, Iger was right there with us. Clean place. The tables were newer. The tabarets were newer. Material was better.
Two of Kubert's sons, Andy Kubert and Adam Kubert, themselves became recognized comic book artists, as did Andy's daughter Emma Kubert[3][4] and many of Kubert's former students, including Stephen R. Bissette, Amanda Conner, Rick Veitch, Eric Shanower, Steve Lieber, and Scott Kolins. Kubert's other grand-daughter, Katie Kubert, became an editor for both DC and Marvel Comics.[5][6]
Kubert was born September 18, 1926[7] to a Jewish family in Jezierzany in southeast Poland (now Ozeriany in Ukraine).[8] He was the son of Etta (ne Reisenberg) and Jacob Kubert.[9] He immigrated to Brooklyn, New York City, United States, at age two months with his parents and his two-and-a-half-year-old sister Ida. Raised in the East New York neighborhood, the son of a kosher butcher,[10] Kubert started drawing at an early age, encouraged by his parents.[11]
In his introduction to his graphic novel Yossel, Kubert wrote, "I got my first paying job as a cartoonist for comic books when I was eleven-and-a-half or twelve years old. Five dollars a page. In 1938, that was a lot of money".[11] Another source, utilizing quotes from Kubert, says in 1938, a school friend who was related to Louis Silberkleit, a principal of MLJ Studios (the future Archie Comics), urged Kubert to visit the company, where he began an unofficial apprenticeship and at age 12 "was allowed to ink a rush job, the pencils of Bob Montana's [teen-humor feature] Archie".[12] Author David Hajdu, who interviewed Kubert and other comics professionals for a 2008 book, reported, however, that, "Kubert has told varying versions of the story of his introduction to the comics business at age ten, sometimes setting it at the comics shop run by Harry "A" Chesler, sometimes at MLJ; however, MLJ did not start operation until 1939, when Kubert was thirteen".[13]
Kubert attended Manhattan's High School of Music and Art.[11] During this time he and classmate Norman Maurer, a future collaborator, would sometimes skip school in order to see publishers.[12] Kubert began honing his craft at the Chesler studio, one of the comic-book packagers that had sprung up in the medium's early days to supply outsourced comics to publishers.[14]
Kubert's first known professional job was penciling and inking the six-page story "Black-Out", starring the character Volton,[15] in Holyoke Publishing's Catman Comics #8 (March 1942; also listed as vol. 2, #13). He would continue drawing the feature for the next three issues, and was soon doing similar work for Fox Comics' Blue Beetle.[16] Branching into additional art skills, he began coloring the Quality Comics reprints of future industry legend Will Eisner's The Spirit, a seven-page comics feature that originally ran as part of a newspaper Sunday supplement.[17]
Kubert's first work for DC Comics, where he would spend much of his career and produce some of his most notable art. Throughout the decade, Kubert's art would appear in comics from Fiction House, Avon, and Harvey Comics, but he worked primarily for All-American and DC.[16] Kubert's long association with the Hawkman character began with the story "A Hot Time in the Old Town" in The Big All-American Comic Book (1944).[18] Kubert drew several Hawkman stories in that title as well as in All Star Comics.[19] He and Irwin Hasen drew the debut of the Injustice Society in All Star Comics #37 (Oct. 1947) in a tale written by Robert Kanigher.[20] The Kanigher/Kubert team created the Thorn in Flash Comics #89 (Nov. 1947).[21]
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