As if we needed to find more examples of why former animator / layout man and Dell and Gold Key comic book artist HARVEY EISENBERG was so great, let's examine CHIP 'N' DALE # 17 (Dell Comics, Cover Date: March-May, 1959 - with a Harvey Eisenberg cover!)
In particular, an untitled one-page gag on the inside front cover that I called "Lines of Progress (or "Progress is for the Birds") for purposes of my personal indexing.
Tell me that's not great!
Chip 'n' Dale never looked better (even in animation) than when Harvey Eisenberg drew them. So expressive!
And that intrusive flock of BIRDS! Magnificent!
The detail on the tree trunk and telephone pole (...complete with lineman)! The WIRES not hanging "straight across" - but "dipping" or "bowing" a little - as wires tend to do! Everything is perfect!
The black-and-white printing of the issue's inside front cover, allows the detail of Eisenberg's work to shine all the more!
And, this was one of those rare occasions where he even LETTERED his work!
Especially in this age of unnecessary-yet-purposeful exaggeration, nobody produces work that comes close to the superb artistic quality of the great Harvey Eisenberg!
6 comments:
The cover art is interesting, as well. It reminds me more of Gold Key's later 70's covers than of Dell's in the 50's, especially with the stylized version of Donald Duck in the background. The Donald looks like Al Hubbard's work, but I'm not sure about Chip 'n' Dale. I don't know if different artists did different characters on covers or if one artist always did the whole thing. The foreground chipmunks are very on-model.
I, too, have become a fan of Harvey Eisenberg--mainly through discussions on this blog, although I appreciated his work long before I knew who he was. One aspect I really like is his ability to draw what I can only describe as "pouty faces" such as the one shown on Chip in the first few panels. He could draw a "pouty face" and still keep the character looking like the character. In fact, he had quite a range of expressions and nuance that is probably difficult to achieve in an anthropomorphic character. In his hands they seem to think and feel. Not putting it very well, but that's my impression of one of the reasons his work is so timeless and entertaining. On top of everything else, the gag itself is clever and quite charming.
Lots of interesting stuff to “unpack” (as they say these days), Scarecrow…
That cover actually *was* reprinted in the ‘70s, for CHIP ‘N’ DALE #12 (September, 1971), and if you happen to have that issue, it might “influence” you to think ‘70s.
More interesting is that I *also* thought the figure of Donald (…and ONLY the figure of Donald) looked like Al Hubbard’s work. Harvey Eisenberg didn’t draw Donald very often (…and probably not outside of his own Chip ‘n’ Dale stories), but there are some examples and they don’t look like the image on this cover. Yet, the figures of Chip ‘n’ Dale are very definitely Eisenberg’s, and certainly not Hubbard's!
I can only guess that maybe Al Hubbard was tapped to do an art correction or maybe even ADD Donald to the cover, perhaps replacing a more generic farmer, Grandma Duck, Brer Bear, or something else, due to the greater appeal of having Donald on the cover.
That you, too, also zeroed-in on the "pouty face" style is fascinating as well. That was a character design element associated with Hanna and Barbera going back to Tom and Jerry, and carried forward into their earliest TV cartoons (think “Jinks Junior”) – with that extended lower lip. I don’t know how far back Eisenberg goes with H-B but he could very well have originated that… or, if not, then maybe it was Ed Benedict.
Do you think Eisenberg did such impressive detail-work on the telephone pole, the tree trunk and the birds because he knew this would be printed in black-and-white? Or did he draw such rich detail even when the art was to be colored?
Elaine:
Given the way Western Publishing worked, it is unlikely that Eisenberg knew the position, within the book, of the stories he worked on. He just did them, handed them in, and (probably) Chase Craig laid-out the book consisting of the finished material by Eisenberg and others who contributed stories.
Exceptions to this might have been the very small number of creators who were responsible for delivering an ENTIRE BOOK – front cover, up to 32 pages of interior story content, and (if needed) inside and back covers – such as Carl Barks with UNCLE SCROOGE or Bud Sagendorf with POPEYE.
Eisenberg may have felt it likely that a one-page gag like this might have appeared in black-and-white on an inside cover, but it’s doubtful that he’d have known for certain as one-page gags also appeared within the 32 interior pages.
He was simply a craftsman of the highest order, with work rich in detail and character expression as a matter of course – and was still innovating and invigorating his art by 1965, at the time of his (way-too-soon) death! In my opinion, his last few issues of THE FLINTSTONES and YOGI BEAR still stand as the BEST those characters (and the storytelling and surroundings) have EVER looked!
And, while Phil DeLara, Lynn Karp, and Massimo Fecchi all did some fine work on TOM AND JERRY, no one made them “more perfectly animated on the printed page” than Harvey Eisenberg!
That is a very strange perspective shot. You certainly couldn’t duplicate that in a photo, to make Donald so small unless Chip and Dale were as big as Donald’s nephews!
Deb:
Leave it to an artist to see something like this. I've been familiar with that particular cover since 1971, when it was reprinted for CHIP 'n' DALE (Gold Key) #12, and have never noticed.
All the more reason to suspect that Donald was "added or corrected" after the fact.
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