MD -- Bethesda -- Zapp! Comic Books and the Arts (w/Jerry Robinson and Lee Marrs):
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- Description of Pictures: Comic-con: Come see our new VisArts building, and this Comic Book exhibition and convention, and our inaugural exhibit, Zapp! Comic Books and the Arts. Speakers include Jerry Robinson (who began work on Batman and Joker beginning in 1939) and Lee Marrs.
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- Specific picture descriptions: Photos above with "i" icons next to the bracketed sequence numbers (e.g. "[1] ") are described as follows:
- ZAPP_071117_003.JPG: Ellen Vartnoff
- ZAPP_071117_006.JPG: Jerry Robinson
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Jerry Robinson (born January 1, 1922 in Trenton, New Jersey) is an American comic book artist best known for his work on the Batman line of comics during the 1940s.
Early life and career:
Jerry Robinson was a journalism student at Columbia University in Manhattan when he began working for writer-artist Bob Kane in 1939. Kane, with writer Bill Finger, had shortly before created the character Batman for National Comics, the future DC Comics. Robinson rented a room from a family in The Bronx near Kane's family's Grand Concourse apartment, where Kane used his bedroom as an art studio. He started as a letterer and a background inker, shortly graduating to inking secondary figures. Within a year, he became Batman's primariy inker, with George Roussos inking backgrounds. Batman quickly became a hit character, and Kane rented space for Robinson and Roussos in Times Square's Times Tower.
Approximately a year and a half after being hired by Kane, National Comics hired Robinson and Finger away from Kane, making them company staffers. Robinson recalled working in the bullpen at the company's 480 Lexington Avenue office, alongside Superman creators Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster, Jack Kirby, Fred Ray, and Mort Meskin, "who was one of my best friends, who I brought up from [comics publisher] MLJ."
Robin and the Joker:
By early 1940, Kane, partly inspired by the Junior character from the Dick Tracy comic strip, and Finger discussed adding a sidekick. Robinson suggested the name "Robin," after Robin Hood books he had read during boyhood, saying in a 2005 interview he was inspired by one book's N.C. Wyeth illustrations. The new character, orphaned circus performer named Dick Grayson, came to live with Bruce Wayne as his young ward in Detective Comics #38 (April 1940) and would inspire many similar sidekicks throughout the Golden Age of comic books.
Batman's archnemesis the Joker was introduced near that same time, in Batman #1 (Spring 1940). Credit for that character's creation is disputed. Robinson has said he created the character. Kane's position is that "Bill Finger and I created the Joker. Bill was the writer. Jerry Robinson came to me with a playing card of the Joker. That's the way I sum it up. [The Joker] looks like Conrad Veidt -- you know, the actor in The Man Who Laughs [the 1928 movie based on the novel] by Victor Hugo. ... Bill Finger had a book with a photograph of Conrad Veidt and showed it to me and said, 'Here's the Joker.' Jerry Robinson had absolutely nothing to do with it. But he'll always say he created it till he dies. He brought in a playing card, which we used for a couple of issues for him [the Joker] to use as his playing card."
Robinson, whose original Joker playing card was on public display in the exhibition "Masters of American Comics" at the Jewish Museum in New York City, New York, from Sept. 16, 2006 to Jan. 28, 2007, and the William Breman Jewish Heritage Museum in Atlanta, Georgia from Oct. 24, 2004 to Aug. 28, 2005, has countered that: "Bill Finger knew of Conrad Veidt because Bill had been to a lot of the foreign films. Veidt ... had this clown makeup with the frozen smile on his face. When Bill saw the first drawing of the Joker, he said, 'That reminds me of Conrad Veidt in The Man Who Laughs.' He said he would bring in some shots of that movie to show me. That's how that came about. I think in Bill's mind, he fleshed out the concept of the character."
In 1943, when Kane left the Batman comic books to focus on penciling the daily Batman newspaper comic strip, Robinson took over the full penciling, along with others such as Dick Sprang. As was customary of the time, only Kane's name appeared on the strip.
Later career:
Robinson went on to work on numerous other characters and for several publishers, at one point even doing free-lance illustrations for at least one textbook publisher. Following his departure from DC Comics, Robinson's most popular creation was his syndicated feature True Classroom Flubs and Fluffs, which for most of the 1960s ran in the Sunday comics section of several newspapers, most notably the New York Sunday News (later incorporated into the Daily News).
He was president of the National Cartoonists Society from 1967 to 1969 and president of the Association of American Editorial Cartoonists in 1979. In 1978 he founded Cartoonists & Writers Syndicate/CartoonArts International.
Awards:
For his work in comics, he won several awards, including the National Cartoonists Society award for the Comic Book Division in 1956, their Newspaper Panel Cartoon for 1963 for Still Life, their Special Features Award in 1965 for Flubs and Fluffs, and their Milton Caniff Lifetime Achievement Award in 2000. Robinson was inducted into the Comic Book Hall of Fame in 2004.
On May 26, 2007, DC Comics announced that Robinson had been hired by the company as a "creative consultant". The press release accompanying this announcement did not describe Robinson's duties or responsibilities.
- ZAPP_071117_044.JPG: Lee Marrs
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Lee Marrs is best known for her comic book series, The Further Fattening Adventures of Pudge, Girl Blimp. Created from 1973 to 1978, it chronicles the Candide-like journey of a young girl to get laid amid the turbulent 1960's San Francisco. The framework of discovery allowed Marrs to comment on both the eternal concerns of all youth and the trends and fads of the day. Today it is a window into the late ‘60s culture. Funny, insightful and honest, it is a cult classic.
Underground comics:
Marrs was a frequent contributor to underground comics and one of the "founding mommies" of the Wimmen's Comix collective. She provided stories for Wet Satin, Manhunt, El Perfecto and Gates of Heaven. Her parodies – often substituting lesbians in place of heterosexual figures – in the long-running Gay Comics livened that title's pages.
As one of Mike Friedrich's Star*Reach regulars, she expanded her writing and art style to include serious fantasy fiction in "Stark's Quest" (1977-79), a study in ESP, politics, and social engineering. From this body of work, "Waters of Requital" (1977) is especially powerful.
Using the more illustrative of styles, she created short futuristic graphic tales for Heavy Metal magazine, Epics Illustrated and Imagine magazine. Of these stories, "Freeways" (1979) stands out as a mute, moving testimony to inspiration and rebellion.
Mainstream comics:
Marrs had a mainstream comics career at the same time - one of the few comic book creators to do so. She was introduced to the DC editor, Joe Orlando by Tex Blaisdell, an artist she had worked for on Prince Valiant and Lil' Orphan Annie. After a start with DC's Plop, Weird Mystery and House of Secrets, she created "Crazy Lady" (1975), a series about growing up female for Marvel's Crazy magazine. But most of her mainstream comics work was as a writer, in Wonder Woman : Annual 1989, Viking Glory: the Viking Prince (1991), and Zatanna: Come Together (1993).
She captured the adventurous tone and humor exactly right for Dark Horse's series Indiana Jones and the Arms of Gold (1994) and Indiana Jones and the Iron Phoenix (1995), stories drawn exquisitely by Leo Duranona. In the foreword to Viking Glory, comics genius Will Eisner said "Marrs is a 1982 Inkpot Award winner with a substantial experience in animation. This is evident from the kinetic movement of the characters her plot ordains." The same could be said for the Indiana Jones tales.
Animation:
Indeed Marrs has had another career, that of an animation director – parallel to her comics work. An Emmy Award-winning art director, she has run Lee Marrs Artwork, a digital design & animation company for many years. The company's slogan : "Serving the Cosmos Since 1972".
She pioneered in 2D digital animation in the early 1980s, Her clients have included Disney/ABC, Apple Computer, IBM, Time Warner Inc., Children's Television Workshop, Nickelodeon, Electronic Arts, and MTV.
- ZAPP_071117_076.JPG: Mike Rhode, Larry Malakhoff
- ZAPP_071117_259.JPG: Lawrence Malalkhoff, ???, and Lee Mars
- ZAPP_071117_271.JPG: Jerry Robinson and Mike Rhode
- Bigger photos? To save server space, the full-sized versions of these images have either not been loaded to the server or have been removed from the server. (Only some pages are loaded with full-sized images and those usually get removed after three months.)
I still have them though. If you want me to email them to you, please send an email to guthrie.bruce@gmail.com
and I can email them to you, or, depending on the number of images, just repost the page again will the full-sized images.
- Featured Folk: Some of the people here can also be seen on other pages on this site.
- Marrs, Lee appears on:
- Rhode, Mike appears on:
- Robinson, Jerry appears on:
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