The Complete Creator Collection, No.4: Bernard Krigstein: the Complete Atlas Stories. Seattle: Fantagraphics, 2026. 358pp, $125
Review by Paul Buhle
It should be noted from the outset that “The Complete Atlas Stories” follows the publication of a series of Bernard Krigstein’s collected works by Fantagraphics: The Outsider, The Master Race and Messages in a Bottle. The second, featuring Krigstein’s famous 8-page tale of revenge against a Nazi war criminal, published in 1955, contains his work for EC that will remain for many his masterpiece. But everything done by the artist is worth pondering as a vital part of comics history and, indeed, US art history. That Krigstein’s work continues to reappear is a remarkable thing, if still somewhat beyond the range of the emerging comic scholarship.
We live, more generally, in a moment of comic art—its scholarship as well as its ongoing creation— that devotees from two generations ago could not have conceived. The survey Comic Studies: a Guidebook, published in 2020 and now very much out of date, offers a mere glimpse at the enterprise, now deeply embedded within academic life as much as the printed page, with learned journals, graduate studies and a couple of dozen university presses offering books about individual artists, trends and so on.
The age of the devotee or non-academic scholar would seem to be passed, but this judgment may be too early and too limited. The critics and reviewers who write for the on-line publications may hold university positions, be themselves graduate students or undergraduates, but a fascination with the form outpaces their credentials. Or so it seems to me, an academic and former Left magazine publisher who fell into publishing Radical America Komiks (1969) as a very successful one-shot, as much for the antiwar politics as for the art or for the always-shaky finances of the magazine.
From Master Race, March, 1955.
Greg Sadowski’s biography of Bernard Krigstein, B.Krigstein (2002) is a work of devotion, one of the finest of any comic artist. It brings back to life the achievements of an artist who had been largely remembered for a single and unique post-Holocaust subway story. Master Race, with selections by Sadowski, is doubtless representative of the artist’s best work.
This collection under review naturally references Sadowski’s biography, which set the context. I offer a condensed version here:
The crew at EC Comics, the domain of Harvey Kurtzman et.al., emphatically including boss-owner Bill Gaines, came from here and there, if mostly passing through the armed forces of World War II. Krigstein liked to say that he had learned drawing largely through comics, but he took to illustrations and painting so quickly and easily after the decline of comics that he seems always to have been an artist seeking both to realize the possibilities of comic art and also to get beyond its limitations. The only artist with a degree in Fine Art, he never lost his touch, based in part on a familiarity and a comfort with art history that other comic artists could not have possessed.
His skill also surely reflected his love of storytelling. Crucially, he was also instinctively democratic. “I belong to low culture. This is my thing.Not only do I belong to low culture. I don’t think low culture is low culture. It’s all culture,” (p.1) Krigstein told a Boston audience in 1978.
His father, emigrating from Belorussia during the 1910s, was a highly skilled cutter in the garment trades, rising to engineer and inventor, finally opening a garment factory of his own. Son Bernie, slow to come to the realization that he could be a real artist, was urged onward by his fiancee—herself the daughter of a Yiddish artist and Communist mother from the high days of the Left in the “Red Decade” 1930s.
Krigstein, resolving to become an art teacher, graduated cum laude from Brooklyn College in 1940—again something unusual, almost unique among future comics craftsmen. Jobs were scarce and he found himself working in a hat factory, struggling to create a union. Fired, he found a job at the prestigious Works Progress Administration, which had done so much wonderful public art work, murals to theater, through the New Deal Era. But the WPA. abolished by a Republican pressure in Congress in 1942, offered no respite in his search for a job.
A short-term strategy, as it turned out, became a career decision that led to a staggering output of comic art from the end of the 1940s onward. As the collection under review shows, he undertook stories of every kind, fantasies to wartime realism. How often he actually scripted—in those days of comic book mass production, with divisions of labor and redivisions of divisions—would be hard to say. He interpreted the scripts for their artful possibilities, it was his pride to do so, and his frustration at the limits placed upon his opportunities to express his potential. Sadowski’s biography does a fine job of recalling Krigstein’s ups and downs, often with the help of widow Natalie Krigstein—herself a scriptwriter for comics until the romance genre petered out in the middle 1950s—and a giant pile of unpublished Krigstein drawings.
Krigstein thrived as a comic artist, not only from his art background but by learning from the best that the comics world had to offer, including the work of Joe Simon and Jack Kirby—although he joined National after their departure. He felt relieved when the Superhero era ended (or paused) in 1949 and he could turn to themes such as crime—the favorite theme of the day, realized in the best-selling Crime Does Not Pay series, along with westerns and romance. Realism noir-style, the source of his greatest fame to later critics, did not yet play a major role in this work, presumably because opportunities lacked. Krigstein thus worked and sometimes stumbled through a half-dozen companies.
By 1949, Krigstein the artist—we could also say the movie-goer, because Hollywood films pre-TV reached audiences close to the peak year of 1946—was living in the Noir Era. “Noir,” actually given the name a bit later by French film critics, carried the film techniques but also the mood of the postwar era. The sense of collectivity experienced during wartime rapidly dissolved, and the growingly prosperous society emerging showed the dark edges of a brutal individualism. Audience thirst for films, met by low-budget, single-source lighting, suited the times and the film art achieved, especially if not only on the Left. Hollywood’s radicals,overwhelmingly Jewish and still a few years from the Blacklist, created dozens of films of this genre, with some of the biggest stars of the era.
If film noir’s cinematic artists had a comics counterpart, it was surely Krigstein’s work. That he would shortly be labelled a “Red” for leading a failed attempt to create a comic workers’ union in the early 1950s cannot be a coincidence of fate. A communist he was not; a progressive artist struggling to give a sense of the world around him, most definitely. If an anti-fascist, anti-racist Popular Front could have continued rather than being lost in the Cold War atmosphere, he would surely have been an outstanding artistic figure within it, arguably akin to woodcut artist and illustrator Lynd Ward.
Crime sagas drawn for Hillman notably already offered him the artistic option of “pulling back,” distancing his art within urban, industrial and other such settings. He could become, on occasion, strikingly cinematic, His growing sophistication, described by Sadowski as “graphic line and unorthodox compositions” (p.105) were nevertheless stifled by the limits of the medium, where punch-ups (or shoot-ups) were common and what Krinstein called “Chekhavian” complexity of emotions difficult to impossible. By 1957, seeing the limits as imposing hopeless barriers to further creativity, he abandoned comic art for illustration.
Mistakenly rejecting an offer from Harvey Kurtzman to hire him at EC in 1949, he lost several of what would likely have been his best years, before the crackdown on comics devastated the field. By 1953, he had arrived, and the moment might be best understood in comics history. He drew almost fifty stories for EC’s Weird Science and Weird Fantasy, two lines that actually lost money but were indulged, so to speak, by Bill Gaines because they expressed a comic art that he admired. As difficult as it may be to understand now, these were a credit to him as publisher, setting him above rivals: he ran an Art House in a field where “art” was considered an impossibility.
The Gaines regime, perhaps properly called the Feldstein/ Kurtzman zone, lifted artists upward. But in the particular titles overseen by Kurtzman, freedom was limited. The two Greats would not agree artistically.
Previous visits by Fantagraphic have taken us into the far reaches of the Krigstein oeuvre. The new volume takes us still further into the Krigstein oeuvre. Reprinted in black and white from the photostats available, the suggestion is made that this model offers a clearer aesthetic line. True as that may be, this reader misses the “real comics” feel. Nonetheless, the talent on display was not wasted.
It would be pointless to parse the comics one-by-one. A few generalizations may be helpful:
Krigstein’s work here is surely at its weakest in the Atlas version of Romance stories. Broken hearts and mended hearts of young women, handsome suitors and some less handsome (and suitable), these had become familiar since the 1940s and see little new here, in narrative or in art. Perhaps, however, these are the singular comics in all of Krigstein’s mainstream work aimed at presumably young, female readers. In that light, they are no worse and in art terms alone, somewhat better than Modern Romance and the like.
Krigstein’s comics improve but not overwhelmingly with the war genre, no doubt because they suffer badly, all comics out of EC suffer badly, by comparison with Gaines’ crew. Not only Kurtzman himself, with his humanistic portraits of civilians caught between contending forces (and his visualization of battlefield sounds), but others in the EC field deployed deeper settings, more realistic dialogue and less flag-waving than non-EC war comics of that time or (I would suggest) any other.
Krigstein, who had himself seen so much first hand or close to the lines of WWII, tended to fall back on Cold War stereotypes of the 1950s. Even outside that era, he holds to the white-hat-and-black-hat model or war: one side is all good, if often traumatized, the other side is so much all bad that they do not seem quite human. Civilians form no Partisan networks of resistance behind the front lines, and that means women seem to play no role but victims and/or lovers.
From Uncanny Tales
Horror is better. In art but also in narrative sense, Krigstein approaches EC horror comics’ high standards on his own terms. The stories are not so imaginative at first glance, but improve as the “surprise” feature emerges. His monsters are monstrous, drawn skillfully. His victims are mostly a little helpless but sometimes they turn the tables on the creatures. Sadly, too few of the creatures turn to be victims themselves, trapped within a world alien to them. Krigstein needed more pages, more conceptual room for irony.
There is more here. A Biblical classic or two, some medieval sagas and some SciFi/fantasy. There is a recurrent sense that Krigstein is grinding it out for Atlas, looking realistically at the end of his comcs days looming not too far ahead.
He was decades too early for the graphic novel, which might have allowed him (if he could afford the time) the space to become a full-fledged storyteller. If comic books were to return the superhero, in the 1960s, it was not a field for him anyway.
Krigstein, as Sadowski recorded in B.Krigstein Volume I, went on to book illustrations, to teaching art, and, we hope, to a much deserved retirement with time to contemplate his life’s work. What we see of his paintings, mainly landscapes with some portraits, gives us a sense of his range. His teaching at the High School of Art and Design, as well as visiting posts elsewhere, must have resulted in students grateful for attention. Nothing more needs to be said.
Paul Buhle is an American historian, who is (retired) Senior Lecturer at Brown University, author or editor of 35 volumes, including histories of radicalism in the United States and the Caribbean, studies of popular culture, and a series of nonfiction comic art volumes. He is the authorized biographer of C. L. R. James.
