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Tripwire Reviews The Unseen Jack Katz

Published

5 years ago

August 16, 2021

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You Don’t Know Jack

Tripwire’s contributing writer Tim Hayes takes a look at The Unseen Jack Katz published by Liam Sharp and funded through kickstarter…

The Unseen Jack Katz
Writer: Alan Cowsill
Artists: Jack Katz with Liam Sharp, Art Adams, John McCrea, Bryan Hitch, Roger Langridge and Bill Sienkiewicz

Liam Sharp is the prime mover behind this crowdfunded collection of previously unpublished work by Jack Katz, although the book also features contributions from a dozen other major comics creators plus members of the Katz and Sharp families, and the now 93-year-old Jack Katz himself, making it a community project in several senses. Since completion of Katz’s twelve-year multi-volume fantasy story The First Kingdom in 1986 – the high-water mark of his comics visibility despite being independently published throughout its run – and a subsequent period of sporadic work intended for DC, Katz has opted to remain outside the grind of the commercial mainstream and the convention circuit, focusing instead on painting, teaching, and as this book makes clear some hard thinking about the comics medium as well. But the respect for the work and the man on the part of current comics creators is obvious from the way in which that work has been curated and presented here; and the level of interest from a broader comics readership was clear too as the Kickstarter campaign for the book went post its funding goal by a factor of eight.

As organised by Sharp, the book is part Artist’s Edition, part biography, part tribute and part artistic jam session. A lengthy interview with Katz is followed by selected pages from different Katz projects, including projected romance and horror strips for DC that never came to fruition and pages from some of the artist’s fantasy graphic novel projects, plus the illustrations from The First Kingdom art portfolio originally published by Bud Plant in 1982 and one complete unpublished 22-page story. Several of these are presented in either the raw pencils or alongside newly inked and lettered versions, completed by a roster of creators including Art Adams, John McCrea, Bryan Hitch, Roger Langridge and Bill Sienkiewicz. Seeing Katz’s pencils finished by diverse hands is a quick crash course in how comics inking and lettering works, as well as a glimpse into a parallel history where he settled into a mainstream career and worked with multiple jobbing collaborators. But since everything Katz says in the book about his outlook suggests that this particular neverland was not remotely on the cards, these completed pages feel instead like respectful tribute, artists talking to artist in the most direct way possible.

Anyone who read The First Kingdom and wondered whether the original pencils had the same level of detail and energy as the printed pages will see that this book answers the question. Katz’s roots in the high styles of Alex Raymond and Hal Foster are charged up with his own love of detail and of bodies in motion (and unclothed), and Katz’s brawls are proper knock-down drag-outs. Some pointers to where P. Craig Russell and Barry Windsor-Smith were going are very visible as well, two artists with clear affinity for what Katz was up to while he created his fantasy epic in the 1970s. This book’s interview and profile of the man show Katz to be a serious thinker about comics, who drills into matters philosophical for the mental framework within which his art then takes shape: the complete story in this book is an excerpt from a larger work called “Beyond The Beyond,” and Katz discusses another project in progress referred to here as “The Engenderment of the Voids Exegesis,” which at the very least suggests a comics artist who knows his own mind. Katz has stuck to his personal artistic guns for a long time and followed his own path, creating a significant body of individual work made outside the mainstream – but clearly not done it in isolation, as proven by the group of talented professional admirers who appear in this book to say so.