Writer: Greg Sadowski
Introduction by Natalie Krigstein
Price: $49.95
Publisher: Fantagraphics Books
ISBN: 1560974664

Bernie Krigstein is a bit of an anomaly in comics history. He had no signature character, no signature genre, was uninterested in superheroes, did not write his own comics, and retired from comic books in the late 1950s.

Yet the few comics he's best remembered for - of which MASTER RACE is most notable - stand as some of the finest works of sequential art in the history of the medium. Brian Eno once said of The Velvet Underground that anyone who saw them perform went on to form their own band. Krigstein is just such an artist. His influence can readily be seen in Daniel Clowes, Frank Miller, Chris Ware, Ben Katchor and most notably Art Spiegelman, who wrote a panel-b-panel examination of MASTER RACE, which was one of the many influences of MAUS.

Like Harvey Kurtzman, Bernie Krigstein worked for EC Comics scriptwriter and editor Al Feldstein. Also like Kurtzman, Krigstein produced highly detailed settings and backgrounds. Unlike Kurtzman, who excelled at depicting the horrors of a battlefield in his gritty war stories, Krigstein depicted an urban horror where the antagonists were inner demons, claustrophobic tunnels or faces from the past.

Now, what's worth remembering about Krigstein is that those few comics he's remembered for are regarded as masterpieces of the form. Art Spiegelman has said Krigstein "had the privilege and the misfortune of being an Artist with a capital 'A' working in an Art Form that considered itself only a business". Truly, Krigstein was but one artist among many toiling away at crappy horror and crime comics who just so happened to give comic books their intellectual heart.

Other than Will Eisner, no comic book artist of the 1940s and '50s was as obsessed with using the sequence of each comic panel to illustrate movement and pacing as Krigstein. While Eisner used the entire page as a panel and blended the art into a series of organic movements from one scene to the next, Krigstein dissected the panel into smaller parts creating more room for a story to move. Krigstein used a character's action to express an internal dialogue, thus creating an action in comic panels akin to the narrative movement of a short story or a novel.

Charles Schulz once remarked that a comics artist is someone who has to draw the same thing every day without repeating himself. Truly, Krigstein never repeated himself artistically despite the fact that many of the scripts he had to work from were endless repetitions and twists of the EC Comics shock horror and gore theme. Krigstein illustrated pirates and cowboys, but excelled at urban noir. In one sequential breath he could encompass Modernism, Futurism, Expressionism and Impressionism.

The culmination of his achievement is represented in MASTER RACE, reprinted in its entirety in Sadowki's book, B KRIGSTEIN, VOLUME 1. MASTER RACE is at first glance another of writer and editor Al Feldstein's O Henryesque EC shock stories. Carl Reissman boards a subway train while reflecting on the horrors he experienced in a German concentration camp. He sits across from a man who is eerily familiar. A moment of recognition passes between the two men and Reissman dashes from the train in utter shock. The man gives chase yelling, "I swore I'd get you, Reissman!" The man is swathed in black and his visage is terrifying.

The great twist to MASTER RACE is that Reissman commanded the concentration camp and he's running from a survivor of "a human hell on earth". They race along the edge of the subway platform as the panels break into four vertical slits, Reissman trips and crumples - he falls onto the tracks as the train closes in.

The comic went unnoticed after its first publication due to EC's poor distribution and also as a result of a growing number of newsstands refusing to carry comics at all. The latter was due to Dr Frederick Wertham's SEDUCTION OF THE INNOCENT a book that blamed juvenile delinquency - among other things - on comic books.

At his most righteous, Wertham argued that a comic book that featured a baseball game where the baseball was a human head is a bit unsavory for children. At his worst, Wertham objected "to advertisements for binoculars in comic books because a city child can have nothing to do with binoculars except to spy on the neighbors".

Truly, comics were exploitive of horror and gore, but Wertham criticized not only the comics themselves but also a system that allowed such subject matter to be allowed into the hands of children. His book led to a Senate Hearing on comic books that forced the industry to adopt the Comics Code, a self-censoring committee that stripped the medium of adult themes and intellectualism of any sort.

Robert Warshaw, a writer for The Parisian Review, Commentary and The Nation during the '50s, was an early critic of Dr Wertham. In his essay, 'Paul, the Horror Comics, and Dr. Wertham', Warshaw argued, "Dr Wertham's world, like the world of the comic books, is one where the logic of personal interest is inexorable, and SEDUCTION OF THE INNOCENT is a kind of crime comic book for parents, as its lurid title alone would lead one to expect". The impact on the industry that Wertham's machinations had are hardly explored in this volume; nor, is Krigstein's reaction to the gutting of the industry, but it is no real surprise that Bernie Krigstein chose to leave the profession shortly thereafter.

It's an utter shame, as Feldstein once said; "I think that Bernie Krigstein was shining a light for us to follow in terms of where the comic book should go. It's too bad the door was slammed on it. But Krigstein was a pioneer, just the same as we were earlier pioneers in lifting the level of writing and illustration and allowing the guys to do their own styles."

Once the Comic Code descended on the industry, Krigstein left comics to pursue a teaching career at the High School of Art and Design, illustrating occasional book covers and record albums. By the mid-sixties, he had abandoned his intentions to be a commercial artist and resigned himself to be a teacher; although Krigstein always painted and sketched, he still believed that if done well, comics could be considered high art.

If VOLUME 1 suffers from anything it is that the scope of Sadowski's ambition is larger than the book itself. While Krigstein is an unrecognised innovator of comic book art, after filling one coffee table-sized book with his most well-known and discussed work, a VOLUME 2 is, perhaps, redundant apocrypha; although as a biographer Sadowski has created an examination of Krigstein's work that is well-researched comprehensive and reverent to his subject.

It's worth noting simply because this first volume ends without a conclusion, thus becoming as elusive as an artist who changed the visual language of comics and then said no more about them. Full judgment of Sadowski's work must then be withheld until the completion of the second volume.

According to Sadowski, the story of Bernie Krigstein is "the story of an artist who struggled throughout his lifetime to find his way by exploring the mysteries of his art; who heard colors like musical chords and experience light as revelations; who was never content with what he achieved, with what he already knew and came easy; for whom a painting was a painting only if it was a discovery."

It is with this perspective that the best of biographies are written, and Sadowski has created a celebration of an artist and early proponent of comics as a legitimate form of expression. Sadowski never forgets that Krigstein is an artist with a capital A.

Additional images taken from The Krigstein Archives, a site dedicated to preserving the artist's works online.

Frank Smith is a freelance writer living in Brooklyn, New York.

This article is Ideological Freeware. The author grants permission for its reproduction and redistribution by private individuals on condition that the author and source of the article are clearly shown, no charge is made, and the whole article is reproduced intact, including this notice.