8-10-08
Jack Kamen 1920 – 2008: Beloved Golden Age "Good Girl" and EC Comics Artist
By Bruce! MacIntosh

The Pulse reported last week that legendary comic artist Jack Kamen passed away on August 5, 2008 at the age 88, of causes related to cancer. He is best known for his titillating "girly" art for EC Comics in the early 50s before Dr. Frederick Wertham shut down the party just as everyone was starting to have fun. However, his most prolific output was for the Iger studio in the decade immediately before that.

The following is a brief study Jack Kamen's place in the colorful history of the Golden Age of the 1940s and the rip-roaring days of EC in the early 1950s.

Jack Kamen's main comics production was over 50 years ago, and today many may be unaware of how important were Kamen's contributions, which started with the pre-WWII Iger studios and culminated in a storied career at EC Comics. The latter company fostered a sense of family with its readers with conversational letters columns and friendly biographies printed within the pages of their magazines, and Jack's bio gave the following information: He was born May 29, 1920, in Brooklyn, NY.

As a child, he made chalk drawings on the sidewalks of his neighborhood, until his mother bought him some paper because she was tired of patching the knees on his pants. He attended the Art Students League and the Grand Central Art School, and to pay tuition for his day and evening classes he dressed mannequins and did the window displays for various New York department stores. His first print work was illustrating cowboy and detective pulp magazines.

World War II temporarily postponed Kamen's freelance drawing career, but it did not take him away from the drawing board. The army put him to work for two years illustrating field manuals and preparing visual training aids. It was not last, however, as he was reassigned to combat Signal Corps until his discharge after another two years. Upon returning to civilian life, he married Evelyn: "the girl who had waited".

After WWII, pulp magazines were on the wane but comics were as strong ever, so Kamen quickly made the transition to sequential art. Jack went to work for Jerry Iger's studio, which wrote and illustrated stories for many comics companies. His clean line work fit in well with the preferred style of Fiction House, so his work was featured primarily in that company's comics. His mastery of drawing the female form landed a steady gig drawing the company's romance and jungle girl comics. Because they were such big sellers, he drew many covers of attractive women in compromising positions of distress.

Kamen then moved into an exclusive arrangement with EC Comics, and started drawing some of the company's line of romance comics. However, even when EC replaced their romance line with horror and science fiction titles such as Tales from the Crypt, The Vault of Horror, Weird Science and Weird Fantasy, Jack's gift of drawing the female form was not wasted. Despite the disdain of some fans who thought Kamen's style was inappropriate for the edgier horror line, EC management thought his clean, crisp style and ability to draw attractive women gave their comics mass appeal. His Editor, Al Feldstein later commented, "We gave Kamen those stories where All-American girl and guy are married and then chop each other to pieces."

Some of Kamen's best work came out of this period with EC, until the company was forced to cancel their entire line of horror and science fiction comics because of the heat turned on by crusading psychiatrist Frederic Wertham and a congressional investigation. EC briefly experimented with an unusual comic called Psychoanalysis, for which Kamen's aforementioned realistic figure work was perfect. The short-lived (four issues) series depicted the problems of a fictional psychiatrist's patients.

Kaman created and was the primary illustrator for EC's next magazine experiment, called "Picto-Fiction", a hybrid of paperback fiction that was so popular in the mid-50s and the sequential art of the moribund comic genre. The experimental magazine format was designed to bypass the new Comics Code Authority's restrictions on lurid and suggestive content, but unfortunately was also short-lived. "My favorite work in comics was the concept of 'picto-fiction', [my] last work, and because I created it. My great love for the medium was that, and… my last [contribution to] Psychoanalysis."

Unfortunately, neither Psychoanalysis nor the Picto-Fiction comics such as Crime Illustrated and Shock Illustrated, were able to survive the economic pressures caused by the bankruptcy of EC's national distributor, so the lines folded after only a few issues each. EC's publisher, Bill Gaines was essentially forced out of the comic business, but the company retained its fledgling humor comic Mad and bypassed scrutiny from the incipient Comics Code by converting it to magazine format.

Kamen briefly stayed on and did some cartoons for Mad, but as the work dried up he moved into the advertising game. The confidence brought by a consistent and larger paycheck finally forced Kamen out of comics for good, as it did many of EC's writers and artists at that time. The artist's illustrative style was a perfect fit for advertising, a field in which he then remained for several decades, and his clients included consumer heavyweights such as Pan Am, Smith Corona and RCA. His last, official "comics" work was drawing the posters and providing the simulated comic illustrations for 1982 movie, Stephen King's Creepshow, and the cover to Berni Wrightson's comic book adaptation of the movie.

Kamen later did some of the design illustrations for his son, Dean Kamen, inventor of the Segway vehicle and other robotic appliances for the physically handicapped. In 2000, Jack was the beneficiary of the Inkpot Award for outstanding achievements in comics and was a special guest at that year's San Diego Comic-Con. Although the bulk of Kamen's work was a half century ago, he was an integral part of comic history as he illustrated some of the medium's most beloved stories for the popular "good girl" genre and for the fan-favorite EC Comics.

Sources:
www.eccrypt.com reprinting "EC Biography" from Weird Science #11 and Haunt of Fear #11 (1952).
Mark Evanier's POVOnline, "News From Me", August 6, 2008.
Kari Elkelä, "Jack Kamen Facts". www.sci.fi/~karielk/kamefact.htm
The Comics Journal #240 (2002).