Antonio Prohías (1921-1998)

 

The cover of The All New Mad Secret File on Spy vs Spy by Antonio Prohías, his first such collection, published by Signet in 1965, plus the inside biography of the cartoonist.

Today is May Day, for normal people a day to celebrate the coming of spring, but for communists, bolsheviks, Marxists, and other socialists one to celebrate murder, oppression, poverty, misery, mass incarceration, and mass starvation. Those things aren't really what socialists celebrate (maybe) but they are nonetheless the products of the socialists' efforts. Even Nazis, who peddled just one more brand of socialism, had an official May Day celebration. As the saying goes, birds of a feather flock together.

On this day sixty-one years ago, Cuban cartoonist Antonio Prohías left his homeland for the United States. Born on January 17, 1921, Prohías had been one of Cuba's leading cartoonists until he began criticizing the new Castro regime. On May 1, 1960, he went into exile from his native country. He never returned.

Just two months later, on July 12, 1960, Prohías walked into the New York offices of Mad with a portfolio he had developed since coming to America. Although he spoke no English, he walked out with $800 in payment for his first cartoons to appear in the magazine. In all, Prohías created 241 episodes showing the never-ending battle between a nameless black spy and his equally nameless white nemesis. Spy vs. Spy must surely be considered one of the great comic strips of the twentieth century.

Although there isn't any overt political commentary in Spy vs. Spy, the cartoonist understood the machinery and imagery of oppression and of state-sponsored murder, and he depicted these things to perfection. With their comically grotesque faces, physiques, uniforms, and ornate decorations, his nameless spymasters/regime leaders are only barely exaggerated versions of the real thing. The socialist oppressor and murderer has since learned to be more subtle than that, so subtle in fact that he--and she--have wormed their way into the highest levels of Western government, academia, entertainment, media, and commerce. If he were still living and working today, Antonio Prohías would have to learn equally more subtle ways of lampooning them.

Antonio Prohías died on February 24, 1998, at age seventy-seven in Miami, Florida. If he had lived, he would have turned one hundred years old in 2021. And if he had lived to this May Day, he would have seen not the end of communism in Cuba but at least the end of the Castro dynasty, a happy yet unhappy event that occurred on April 19, 2021.

Antonio Prohías was born in the city of Cienfuegos in Cuba. If we can stretch a metaphor, we can observe that Cienfuegos means "one hundred fires" in Spanish, and we can say that in memory of Prohías and his life's work we might light one hundred fires of freedom, one for each of the one hundred years since his birth. May socialism be one day relegated not only to the dustbin of history but also to that of human thought, belief, and experience. May it soon perish and may the people of the not-very-distant future wonder why anyone would ever have believed in such utterly stupid, outlandish, and ultimately murderous things.

Text copyright 2021 Terence E. Hanley

Ernest Kurt Barth (1929-2001)

Last time I wrote about Lou and Zena Shumsky, authors of the young person's novel First Flight (1962). (She was really the author. Her husband was more of a technical advisor.) This time I would like to write about the illustrator of their book, Ernest Kurt Barth.

Ernest Kurt "Ernie" Barth was born on March 23, 1929, in Rockville Centre, New York, to Ernest and Paula K. (Meeh) Barth. His parents were born in Germany and arrived in America only shortly before his birth. The elder Ernest Barth was a painting contractor but also, as his son remembered, a hobbyist. Ernie Barth was thus well prepared for illustrating a book about boys who build and fly model airplanes.

Ernest K. Barth graduated from Memorial High School in West New York, New Jersey, and served for two years in the U.S. Marine Corps. He applied his G.I. Bill benefits to his education in art at the Pratt Institute in Brooklyn. He graduated with a bachelor's degree in fine arts in 1952. I suspect that he also met his future wife at Pratt.

Ernest Barth had a varied career in art. He worked for a firm called Cellomatic in the early days of television animation. In 1954, he served as an assistant to Al Capp (1909-1979) on the syndicated comic strip Li'l Abner. (Frank Frazetta [1928-2010] was another of Capp's assistants at the time.) From 1953 to 1957, Barth created cover art and interior illustrations for science fiction magazines. Afterwards, he expanded into illustrating books for Dell, Harper & Row, and Random House. Later in life, while living and working in Tuxedo Park, New York, he worked as a graphic artist and commercial artist.

Barth's first wife, Eileen Ann Furlong Barth (1931-1986), was also an artist and a teacher of art at Monroe-Woodbury High School in Woodbury, New York. She was the daughter of Raymond H. Furlong, a printer for the New York Times, and Anna (Ungerer) Furlong, a bank clerk. The Barths and their two daughters lived in San Miguel De Allende, Mexico, for a year in 1973-1974, where Eileen Barth received her master's degree in fine arts. Eileen Ann Furlong Barth died tragically young of cancer. Her husband remarried. He died on March 28, 2001, in Tuxedo Park. His remains were cremated and the ashes scattered, fittingly, by airplane over Orange County, New York.

One of the reasons that I have wanted to write about Ernest Kurt Barth is to show his artwork in the fields of science fiction and fantasy. The Internet Speculative Fiction Database (ISFDb) has a list--actually two lists--of his credits in those fields. I would like to acknowledge that website and to expand on the available biographical information on him. (Find A Grave has a fuller biography than what I have written here, and so I would also like to acknowledge Von Rothenberger, who posted it, along with a photo of Barth, to that site.) There are two entries on the ISFDb on Barth, one for Ernie Barth, the other for Ernest K. Barth. My hope is that those two entries will be combined and that Barth will receive his full due as an artist.

Ernie Barth's cover for Fantastic, October 1954. He was twenty-five when this picture was published. The cover story was "The Yellow Needle" by Gerald Vance.

If you pull back the curtain and show how artwork is really made, submitted, and used in publication, you will see images like this one, Barth's illustrations for Russ Winterbotham's short story "Loralei of Chaos," from Amazing Stories, November 1954. Note the editor's or engraver's marks in blue pencil. Note also the name "H. Rogoff." That was Herb Rogoff (1927-2018), art editor of Ziff-Davis Fiction Group and himself an artist.

Finally, Barth's illustration for "Forced Move," a short story by Henry Lee, published in Worlds of If, June 1955.

Text copyright 2021 Terence E. Hanley

Lou & Zena Shumsky

Louis Shumsky was born into a large family on January 9, 1919, in Norma, New Jersey. His parents, Joseph and Esther Shumsky, were Russian-Jewish immigrants. At age twenty-one, Lou Shumsky was already at work as a photographer, and that's the job he did in the U.S. Army during World War II. He enlisted on November 26, 1940, more than a year before his country entered the war.

Lou Shumsky served at least part of his tour of duty in London, England, and that's where he met his future wife. Her name was Zena Feldman, and she was born in Hackney, Greater London, on January 21, 1926. Zena had an unsettled family life. Her parents, Barnet Feldman and Rebecca Karpinski, divorced in 1937. Zena attended a girls' school in London on a scholarship but had to end her studies and go to work when her father left. She first worked in a law office. Recognizing her talent, her employers offered to pay her way through law school if she would return after graduating to work for the firm. But Zena wanted to be a writer, and so she declined. Instead she went to work for Supreme Headquarters Allied Expeditionary Force (SHAEF) in London. On May 3, 1945, Zena Feldman and Louis Shumsky were married in London. The war in Europe ended just five days later.

The Shumskys returned to the United States in the late 1940s and settled in New Jersey. They had two sons together and moved to Rochester, New York, in 1954. They collaborated on two books, First Flight, illustrated by Ernest Kurt Barth and published in 1962, and Shutterbug, illustrated by Vic Donahue and published in 1963. Zena Shumsky also wrote books on her own, under her own name and two pen names, Jane Collier and Zena Collier. These include:

• The Year of the Dream (young adult fiction, 1962), illustrated by Harper Johnson
• A Tangled Web (young adult fiction, 1967)
• Seven for the People (young adult nonfiction, 1979)
• Next Time I'll Know (young adult fiction, 1981)
• A Cooler Climate (adult novel, 1990)
• Ghost Note (adult novel, 1992)

She also wrote short stories for popular magazines, including:

• "Family Affair," Canadian Home Journal (Nov. 1957)
• "The Innocents," McCall's (Aug. 1964)
• "Trial by Night," Alfred Hitchcock's Mystery Magazine (Jan. 1974)
• "Accomplices," Alaska Quarterly Review (Fall/Winter 1985)

Louis Shumsky died on May 6, 1968, in New Jersey. Zena remarried in 1970 and was also known by her second married name, Zena Hampson. She lived a writing life and was a member of writers' groups and participated in writers' events. Described as a "small, pretty woman with a soft voice and a delightful English accent,"* Zena Feldman Shumsky Hampson died on October 5, 2016, in Rochester, New York. She was ninety years old.

*From the Democrat and Chronicle (Rochester, NY), September 22, 1962, page 8.

I will write a Book Jacket Bio on the illustrator of Lou and Zena Shumky's book, Ernest Kurt Barth, in the next installment of this blog.

Original text copyright 2021 Terence E. Hanley

Iris Owens (1929-2008)

Iris Owens was born Iris Klein on November 25, 1929, in Brooklyn, New York. Her father, Max Klein, was born in Austria. Klein was a professional gambler and his family's life unsettled as a result. In 1940, when the census enumerator found him, he was driving a fruit delivery truck. Iris' mother, named Rose, was a native of Russia and bore three children, of whom Iris was the youngest.

Iris Klein attended Barnard College and is supposed to have graduated from Brooklyn College. She was married twice before age thirty and divorced in pretty short order. She never again married and died without having any children of her own.

Iris moved to Paris in the 1950s and wrote or co-wrote five pornographic novels for Olympia Press under the name Harriet Daimler, what reviewer and novelist Herbert Gold called her nom de cochon ("pig name"). She returned to the United States in 1970 and took up residence again in New York City. Just two more books flowed from her pen, After Claude, from 1973, and Hope Diamond Refuses, from 1984. In 1975 she taught a creative writing workshop at Great Meadow Correctional Facility in Comstock, New York. As the years went by, Iris Owens made fewer and fewer forays from her apartment. Late in life (or maybe not so late) she was, according to accounts, a shut-in. Even the New York Times failed to take note of her death, which came on May 20, 2008. Described during her life and afterwards as ageless, timelessly beautiful, even Junoesque in her stature and appearance, she was seventy-eight years old when the end came.

The narrator of After Claude is a young woman writer who has returned to New York after having lived in Paris. Her name--or maybe we can call it a meta-name--is Harriet Daimler. Herbert Gold (who is still with us) reviewed After Claude for the San Francisco Examiner (July 1, 1973, p. 188), writing: "Owens Qua Daimler [has] proved one of the most important triple-headed theses of modern times: That at one and the same time a woman writer can be (1) funny, (2) pornographic and (3) ladylike." The book is indeed funny--hilarious might be a better word for it--until it isn't anymore. Like Portnoy's Complaint by Philip Roth (1969), it is a funny book about serious things and ends in a kind of sadness and loss. Mr. Gold wrote: "This book dissolves finally in hysteria, the satire troubled by real pain, and the curious abandon at the end of the book adds a dimension of pathos which is against the principles of your standard black humorist."

I snapped this book up when I saw it because of the blurbs on the cover, because it is a fairly short novel (only 219 pages), but mostly because of the cover with its classic 1970s photo illustration and typography, more so because of the classic 1970s look of the cover model. The photographer is Neal Slavin, who is also still with us. I wonder if we'll ever know the name of his subject (although she looks a little or a lot like the actress Jenny O'Hara).

If you would like to read more about Iris Owens, try "Iris Owens: Wit of the Bitch," by Izabella Scott, by clicking here. A list of books by Iris Owens, from the website Wikipedia:

As Harriet Daimler:

• Darling (1956)
• The Pleasure Thieves, with Marilyn Meeske, who wrote under the pseudonym Henry Crannach (1956)*
• Innocence (1957)
• The Organization (1957)
• Woman (reissued as The Woman Thing) (1958)

As Iris Owens:

• After Claude (1973)
• Hope Diamond Refuses (1984)

*To read about Marilyn Meeske, see "Memoirs of a Female Pornographer" in Esquire, April 1, 1965.

Iris Owens (1929-2008)

Original text copyright 2021, 2023 Terence E. Hanley