Comic Art #7

Plot

This issue is another generally strong one, beautifully illustrated and with production values that generally smoke their competitors. It features two articles of particular note, if only for how they embody what the magazine has come to stand for. "Harvey Kurtzman's Hexaflexagon" by Joey Anuff gets into a failed effort by Harvey Kurtzman, these weird comics that could be folded in and out like one of those paper fortune-tellers that kids make. In patient prose, Anuff not only spells out how they worked and how they were likely to have been presented, he makes the case for Kurtzman's involvement in projects as a way of re-evaluating Kurtzman's artistic talent.

A second piece, David Collier's "Krazy Kats," is a rambling memoir of a trip that cartoonists Collier and Pat Moriarity took to George Herriman's home on their way to a San Diego convention. Collier overemphasizes some of his points, but you get a nice picture of the hopelessness that many feel trying to carve out a space for themselves in largely unappreciated art form; the fact that it's set in 1994, the year the alternative comic book died, is an added bonus.