Drew University Magazine » Library http://www.drewmagazine.com Wed, 25 Jan 2012 22:18:22 +0000 en hourly 1 http://wordpress.org/?v=3.3.1 Pow! Ka-boom! Take That! http://www.drewmagazine.com/2011/01/pow-ka-boom-take-that/ http://www.drewmagazine.com/2011/01/pow-ka-boom-take-that/#comments Thu, 06 Jan 2011 18:21:53 +0000 Mary Jo Patterson http://www.drewmagazine.com/?p=3575 A gallery of comic book covers by Joe Kubert, who got a lucky break in the business from a man whose name lives on in Drew’s Special Collections.

Kubert, here in his Dover, N.J., studio, estimates that he’s drawn at least 5,000 covers in his career, many with military themes. Photo by Librado Romero/The New York Times

By Mary Jo Patterson

Joe Kubert started drawing before most children learn to talk, grasping a pencil as a toddler and chalking pictures in the streets of his Brooklyn neighborhood by the time he was 3 or 4. Before he could read he fell in love with the Sunday comics in the newspaper, excited by the brightly colored figures that seemed to jump off the page and into his imagination. Joe, the son of a Jewish immigrant butcher, dreamed of becoming a cartoonist but had to learn how. And he did, by knocking on doors of art studios in lower Manhattan during the Depression.

By age 12 he had landed at MLJ Studios, forerunner of Archie Comics, where kindly artists gave him drawing materials and tutored him in penciling and inking. But his first professional job—a six-page story starring Voltron, paying $5 a page—came during his next apprenticeship, at the Harry “A” Chesler Studio, where Kubert also found a nurturing atmosphere. “Harry allowed me to come in as often as I wanted” after class at Manhattan’s High School of Music & Art, he says.

Chesler, whose studio churned out comic strips and books for publishers, amassed an extensive personal collection of popular art, original comic art and literature about the genre. Originally gifted to the Friendship Library at Fairleigh Dickinson University, the art was eventually sent to the Library of Congress and the books to Drew. Today the Rose Memorial Library houses the Chesler Collection of Studies on Cartoon Art and Graphic Satire, a valuable resource for students of cultural history. The collection, which centers on 19th- and 20th-century studies and compendia, holds some 3,000 items, from a 1890 edition of Thomas Nast’s Christmas Drawings for the Human Race and The Katzenjammer Kids: Early Strips in Full Color to the more recent Poison Maiden and The Great Bitch: Female Stereo types in Marvel Superhero Comics.

Kubert went on to become a legend in his industry. Though best known for his war comics—DC characters Sgt. Rock and Hawkman and the syndicated daily Tales of the Green Beret strip—he also illustrated horror, Westerns and animal themes. “I’m fortunate to have been able to make a livelihood at something I love to do,” says the father of five from Dover, N.J., who also runs a school for artists.

In the 1990s he moved into the realm of graphic novels, writing and illustrating somber subjects like the Holocaust and the 1992 siege of Sarajevo. Last year Dean of Libraries Andrew Scrimgeour gave Kubert, 84, a tour of the Chesler Collection, a warmup for Kubert’s keynote lecture at a 2010 Drew symposium on the graphic novel, led by lecturer Sloane Drayson-Knigge T’86, G’90,’02, and library staffer Bruce Lancaster. Kubert is honored, though amused, to find his work worthy of study by academics. “It amazes me,” he says. “I mean, it’s wonderful, it feels good that the work is so accepted. To me, it was just a job.” Still, he did manage to save some of his output. “Not because I collected it,” he laughs, “but because I couldn’t bear to throw it away.”

All art by Joe Kubert. All covers courtesy of DC Comics.

He’s proved himself capable of drawing everything from his own creation, Tor, to superheroes like Batman. Kubert is well known for creating Sgt. Rock, a long-running series that debuted in 1959. He drew Hawkman, an alien policeman from the planet Thanagar (1962). Kubert interpreted Tarzan, starting with the first DC cover in 1972. A 1978 cover for DC Comics’ vaguely supernatural war comic. Many of Kubert's covers had military themes. Kubert's caveman hero, Tor. ]]> http://www.drewmagazine.com/2011/01/pow-ka-boom-take-that/feed/ 0 Paper Cuts http://www.drewmagazine.com/2010/04/paper-cuts/ http://www.drewmagazine.com/2010/04/paper-cuts/#comments Mon, 26 Apr 2010 19:07:26 +0000 Renee Olson http://www.drewmagazine.com/?p=1499

A racist caricature in Drew’s archives of Sally Hemings, Thomas Jefferson’s slave, comes off as an early 19th-century stab at swiftboating.

Archived by Rebecca Rego Barry G’01, the drawing measures 9.5 by 14.5 inches.

By Renée Olson

What’s known about Thomas Gibbons, father of the man who built Mead Hall, is this: He was a Southern rice plantation owner; a cantankerous, litigious steamboat magnate; a Federalist mayor of Savannah, Ga., and a fortunate man who, despite being rather broad in the beam at some 300 pounds, managed to not get shot in a duel. What’s not clear, though, is how a lewd sketch of Sally Hemings, the slave with whom a widowed Thomas Jefferson is believed to have fathered five children, managed to land in Gibbons’ papers at Drew and stay there, virtually unnoticed, until now.

Done in ink and watercolor on now-yellowed linen paper, the sketch shows a bare-breasted Hemings, holding the hand of a son named “Tom.” Accompanying the undated drawing, titled “Mrs. Sally Jefferson,” is a scrap of doggerel written in Hemings’ voice:

It was Late in the Night When Masa came too me He give me fine tings + kisses He get for me a Pickinene All most as white as young Masa (or Misis) Little Tom Jeffer— the young Congo Dauphin

While the handwriting appears to rule out Gibbons as the caricature’s creator, it’s “in keeping with his Federalist attitudes,” says Barbara Oberg, professor of history and general editor of The Papers of Thomas Jefferson at Princeton (and wife of Perry Leavell, Drew professor of history emeritus). From the stance of patrician Federalists, Jefferson, a Democratic-Republican they dismissed as an atheist, “becomes the symbol of everything threatening to law and order” at a time when the young nation’s federal government was just being shaped, she says.

“All the language this piece uses is standard Federalist press discourse,” says History Chair Sharon Sundue. “It’s racist to its core, describing Sally Hemings as a seductress, and is entirely an attack on the character of the white man who would lower himself.” Still, the initial bomb for Jefferson came not from a Federalist, but from a former Jefferson ally named James T. Callender, who outed the relationship in the Richmond Recorder on Sept. 1, 1802, a little over a year into Jefferson’s first term. The Scots-born Virginia journalist had turned on Jefferson when refused a political appointment.

Although the content doesn’t break new ground, the sketch, creased as though folded to fit in an envelope and perhaps mailed to Gibbons, has value for, well, being a sketch. Representations of Hemings are virtually unknown—Annette Gordon-Reed, the Pulitzer Prize–winning author of The Hemingses: An American Family, knew of just two before seeing Drew’s drawing.

In this case, the spiteful doodler clearly wasn’t striving for verisimilitude. “Whoever drew this never saw Hemings, or else he wouldn’t have drawn her as a dark-skinned woman with tightly curled hair,” says Gordon-Reed. “We know what she looked like—she was light-skinned with straight hair—and what her kids looked like, some of whom lived as white people.” Nor did Hemings have a son named Tom, explains Gordon Reed. “The point for a Federalist was to make things as shocking as possible. The president with a dark-skinned mistress and a dark-skinned child were particular affronts—playing into all facets of sexual and racial hysteria,” she says.

Sundue used the sketch this semester in her “American Revolution” course to launch a discussion about racial attitudes of the time. “You can’t not talk about Sally Hemings as part of this conversation,” says Sundue. “I wanted to show this to my students and have them interpret what they’re seeing here, as well as understand the range—and limits of—19th-century critique of slavery.”

Poisoned Pen

Thomas Gibbons was slinging mud at Jefferson and Hemings around the time he had his own troubles with a servant.

Thomas Gibbons, from whom Thomas Jefferson snatched back a federal judgeship given in a so-called “midnight appointment” by an outgoing John Adams in 1801, preferred to launch his attack on Sally Hemings in prose. This excerpt from a scathing letter he wrote to New Jersey Federalist senator (and in-law) Jonathan Dayton on Dec. 20, 1802, holds nothing back.

“That Jefferson lives in open defiance of all decent [rule], with a Mulatto Slave his property named Sally, is as correct as truth itself, and that his children, to wit, Tom, Beverly & Harriot are flat nosed, thick lipped and Tawney I can have no doubt tho I never saw any one of them, And what adds to the monstrous disgrace of this amorous encounter is first that she is half sister to his first wife, and secondly that she is the most abandoned prostitute of her color—pampered into a lascivious course of life, with the benefits of a French Education, she is more lecherous than the other beasts of the Monticellian Mountains.”

Despite its slanderous tone, the letter, archived at the University of Michigan, is considered one of the first primary sources, together with James Callender’s Richmond Recorder article (see main story), to document the existence of a relationship between Jefferson and Hemings. But interestingly, Gibbons goes a step further and includes a detail not included in the newspaper account: the belief that Hemings was the daughter of Martha Jefferson’s father and his slave, Elizabeth Hemings. “This information was not printed [by] Callender,” says Annette Gordon-Reed, the author of The Hemingses: An American Family.

Gibbons appears to have been “somehow privy to all these other networks,” says History Chair Sharon Sundue. His information is “not just secondhand out of the paper.”

Gossip-gathering wasn’t Gibbons’ only talent. Around the time the Hemings rumors started, Gibbons apparently managed to impregnate one of his own servants. Correspondence about this, though nothing that specifies her race, appears in Drew’s Gibbons Family Papers, says T.J. Stiles, 2010 Pulitzer Prize–winning author of The First Tycoon, who used the collection in his research. Gibbons worked to deny the accusation, writes Stiles, “against the advice of some of New York’s leading attorneys.”—R.O.

]]> http://www.drewmagazine.com/2010/04/paper-cuts/feed/ 1