dir: John Boorman
HELP! I'M IN THE PACIFIC!
Cracked #79, September 1969
w: Stu Schwartzberg
a: Edward Severin (John Severin)
Note that this was done 52 years ago when the word "oriental" to describe a person and certain racist stereotypes were considered acceptable by mainstream society. Anyone who's fluent in Japanese and knows what the dialogue is in the following panels, if these are actual words, please say so in the comments (It might have been a way to get profanity by. That's not the first time anyone did that).
It's World War II and an American soldier (Lee Marvin) and a Japanese soldier (Toshiro Mifune) are both stranded on a Pacific island. The American initially just wants fresh water for his canteen.
They both torture each other but put aside their differences to build a raft to escape the island.
YouTube has the full feature uploaded if you can tolerate the brightness and cropping the uploader has used to get around copyright bots.
Schwartzberg did the layouts too, and it really shows. I think Severin was a lot funnier when laid out by others, whether it's this, Kurtzman's Mad, or stories with his sister Marie.
ReplyDeleteRevisiting all this old humor mag stuff has given me a renewed appreciation for Severin - he was an impeccable draftsman - but I never thought he drew funny. I'd be hard-pressed to say exactly why; there's just something about his work that's too orderly and reserved.
Comics that are laid out are always better. It's the difference between Kurtzman and Feldstein's work for EC. You can tell Alan Moore does that too. When I've written for other artists, it's never worked for me to do it in script form.
DeleteJohn Severin was better for war and adventure where he started, his photo-realism was was perfect for CRACKED in the late seventies when they were competing with TIGER BEAT as much as they were competing with MAD. A lot of the older guys were genre artists that did humor because that's where the work was, some were more appropriate for it, some weren't.