Fleur's flight of fancy

These facsimile pages (beautifully printed) from the twelve issues of Flair are a celebration of Fleur Cowles zest for creativity in culture and the arts. The 338 pages must have been a challenge for the Hong Kong printers, they had to cope with various foldout pages, die-cut holes, different paper stock and bind in several short pages, two concertina foldouts and five sixteen-page booklets.

Sumptuous though the book is I feel that Flair is resting in its reputation. To my mind, having worked as a publication art director, the photos, typography and layouts are very conservative and do not show any particular innovative design. Federico Pallavicini was responsible for the design (though uncredited) he was more used to painting and theatre set design rather than typography and page layout. Other magazines and designers were much more creative in the fifties, 'Fortune' with Will Burtin, 'Glamour' with Cipe Pineless, 'Harper's Bazaar' with Alexey Brodovitch and 'Vogue' with Alexander Liberman. Certainly, the covers with their die-cut holes (sadly only six of the twelve are included) and the bound-in booklets were unique to consumer magazines at the time but I think that Flair should be remembered as a magazine concept rather than a magazine full of creativity.

Fleur Cowles writes a short piece about the origins of Flair (handwritten in gold on dark blue paper) but does not give enough detail (I believe each issue involved several printers and binders) and as there were only twelve issues a list of all the articles should have been included. The high price (reassuringly expensive?) and the cloth-covered box the book comes in reflects snob appeal, I agree but I'm still pleased to have a copy.

Shock and awe

Taschen continues its large-size comic history books with an excellent overview of the EC line. The 594 pages are a bit less than the 75-year history of DC (2010) and Marvel (2014) which both had 720 pages. Grant Geissman was a good choice as the writer, he's already done two books about EC comics: 'Tales of terror' (2002) and 'Foul play' (2005).

If you want to know about the text in the book have a read of the almost 2,000-word review by Runmentionable on this page. My review is more about the visual aspect of the book. The five chapters start with Max Gaines in 1933 and his comics which were very much like other titles on the newsstands, Bill Gaines took over EC titles in 1947 following the death of his father. The story really gets interesting with chapter four exploring the New Trend horror comics with editor/ illustrator Al Feldstein and artist Johnny Craig. He was joined on the horror titles by Graham Ingels (who signed his art as Ghastly) Harry Harrison, Wally Wood, Harvey Kurtzman, Jack Davis, Jack Kamen, Joe Orlando. The New Trend stories and art were far superior to others in the very crowded comics market and the book has plenty of color pages with huge blow-ups of covers and individual pages to reveal just how good they were though I always felt that Kurtzman's art was more lightweight because he never put in the detail like Davis, Orlando or Wood.

Gaine's 'Suspense stories' (the cover title said Suspenstories) with various titles get a good showing with several over-the-top covers by Johnny Craig which featured in Fredric Wertham's 1954 'Seduction of the innocent' book attacking the illustrated violence aspect of the industry. Looking at these covers now I wonder just what Gaines was thinking by publishing 'Crime Supenstories' December 1953/January 1954, (issue 20) with an immaculate Johnny Craig drawing showing the face of a dead man with a noose around his neck or another Craig cover for 'Crime Suspensense' May (issue 22) with a close-up of a severed female head held by a man and in his other hand a bloodied ax (though the blood was black). No wonder politicians and the public were alarmed at this material in the hands of children.

EC continued in the fifties with their 'Vault', 'Crime', 'Shock' and 'Weird' comics and in 1952 Gaines tried something new with first issue of the satirical 'Mad' and in 1954 the similar 'Panic', which lasted for twelve issues but 'Mad' continued on and on. Another Gaines and Feldstein idea was 'Picto-Fiction' magazines but like 'Panic' they didn't last. In the end, it was only 'Mad' that remained of EC publishing.

The book, with over a thousand illustrations, covers all the EC titles and the last seventy-eight pages has a complete cover gallery of them all, including the pulped 'Shock illustrated' issue three from May 1956 though 'Mad' covers only go up to issue thirty-five. Nicely some of the covers in this section are huge with the rest about playing card size so it's possible to see the detail. Another excellent feature in the book is the thirty-nine page size covers and splash pages in black and white so you can see just how great some of the artists were. Throughout the book all the illustrations have comprehensive captions.

Now that Taschen has published excellent histories of DC, Marvel and EC I wonder what is left?