The Page that Changed Comics Forever

I remember Mr. Krigstein as one of my instructors at the High School of Art and Design in New York City, way back in 1970. He was one of the best art teachers I ever had. Mr. K never talked down to his students, was incredibly upbeat and assured us that doing art of any kind was both an adventure and an experience. After his bad experiences in comics and illustration, you would think he would tell us differently, but he didn't. It wasn't his way. I wanted to get into the comics business back then (unfortunately, I didn't get any further than working freelance at Warren Comics' production department) and I didn't know about Mr. K's comics career until the late 1980s, when I came across a portion of his Master Race story in Print magazine. Maybe it's just as well I didn't tell him of my aspirations of becoming the next Neal Adams. On the other hand, it would've been one hell of a conversation. I guess I'll never know. If you want to know more about the life and art of Bernard Krigstein, get a hold of "B. Krigstein", vol. 1 and 2 by Greg Sadowski, published by Fantagraphics. Volume 1 has the complete "Master Race" story. I assure you, it'll add to the legend.

How heartbreaking he didn't get to see that museum event. What a story, thanks for telling it.

Becoming a "high school" teacher is not the same as becoming an art teacher at the High School of Art and Design. I went in there as a sophomore and had to submit a formal portfolio and take an art exam. The standards to get in were high. The teachers were excellent and many of them were experienced professionals in the various art forms before becoming teachers. I went there in the early 1970s. I don't recall Krigstein, but there were other amazing people like Hollingsworth, Glicksman, Ferguson and so on.

In 1984, I was 8 years old. My mother was a schoolteacher and would often receive books for her classroom from donors, book companies, etc. One day, she came home with a large, hard-bound book called "A Smithsonian Book of Comic Book Comics". Since I liked comics, she gave it to me rather than put it in her classroom. This book was INCREDIBLE. Not only did it have both Superman and Batman debuts, it had many other examples of comics from a variety of genres from the '30s to the '50s. "Master Race" was included in this collection. And.., wow. I don't think I've EVER read a comic or graphic novel that packed so much into just 8 pages. It is an absolutely brilliant and terrifying story that is impossible to forget. Thank you for sharing this story with us.

Stan Lee being against any form of "non-safe" storytelling is so on brand.

"and that EC supernerd who spent a whole issue talking about Kriegstein? His name was Art Speigleman" That's honestly the kind of twist that is surprising because I should have seen it coming. Almost poetic in it's perfection Maus truly is as amazing as it is hyped up to be. I've never had a comic move me the way that did

Those four panels of the man falling in to the path of the passenger train are phenomenal in conveying human emotion. You can practically feel every ounce of pain and desperation in the character with each panel.

We read Maus in English class when I was in 7th grade (1991). It was literally life changing, it made an incredibly challenging topic completely accessible to us while never watering down the content. I started reading the Sandman series a few years later, another feat of visual storytelling

The tragedy of not being allowed to live up to your potential, heartbreaking and all too relatable.

I can't believe this is the first video on this channel, how is that possible? This was incredible

I can't tell you how much I enjoyed and appreciated this video on so many levels. He was a brilliant storyteller AND painter. He was an instructor of mine at Art and Design and one of the few I remember fondly and vividly. One of my inspirations to become a professional.

I remember Scott McCloud in "Understanding Comics" (1993) marked something like this as a feature of Japanese comics that differed from the American Comics he knew, and theorized that American comics had adapted to not waste panels because they were published in shorter forms, while Japanese comics were published in longer forms, but he also suggested some kind of difference in artistic philosophy between "the West" and "the East". That being said, he mainly talked about the much higher frequency in the Japanese comics he considered of "aspect-to-aspect" transitions, where panels show different parts of the same scene without any real temporal relationship between them, whereas your example is "moment-to-moment" transitions (though I think you more generally consider any case where multiple panels are used without words or wit the same words), which he measured as very rare in both American and Japanese comics, with the exception of some he called "experimental comics", like "Skinless Perkins", though slightly more common in Japan and actually in the first example of Japanese comics having different panel-to-panel transitions he showed. By the time he wrote "Making Comics" in 2006, he was saying the American Comics industry suffered a huge decline in the 1990s, around the same time (not that he was suggesting a causal connection) that Japanese Comics were becoming popular in the US, and that now new American comics artists are at least as familiar on average with Japanese comics as American ones, and therefore naturally incorporate Japanese styles that used to be foreign to Americans.

I found that issue of IMPACT laying on the ground en route home from the grocery store maybe 4-ish years after its publication. I was about 10 then. It had a GREAT impact on me, mostly due to this particular story. No idea why/how this issue wound up (face up in perfect condition) in an overgrown empty field near where I lived. Odd. As kids in the 50's we all knew a lot about the holocaust, but this story reminded me/us about haunting memories that would tail the survivors throughout their lives. (Btw, the rotary phone wasn't truly "old" relative to the time frame in which you referenced it.)

This was great! It is worth noting that Fantagraphics is doing amazing job reprinting those great old comic masters in their EC Artists Library line. There's a volume called Master Race and other stories, reprinting Krigstein's masterpiece.

Matttt, you have hit ONE MILLION views with a Bernard Krigstein video. To me, as a longtime Krigstein fan, this is about as surreal as it gets, and also incredibly heartening. Congratulations, thank you and best wishes for continued success. :)

Brilliant storytelling. I had not heard of B. Krigstein until now. The motion of the faces on the train in M.R. reminds me of 'Dynamism of a Dog on a Leash' and other work by Giacomo Balla. Krigstein was a fine artist so he probably knew the work too. It would be interesting to know about the artistic influences that led to his comic style.

The fact that this is the man who inspired Maus (and, to my mind, parts of Watchmen, given that the Black Flag comic that intersperses it is in the EC style) is just amazing. It's like saying that Glacier (a WCW wrestler who retired after a few years to teach just as Krigstein did, and even ended up having Cody Rhodes as one of his students) is responsible for the current form of professional wrestling.

Being a High School teacher you have a bigger impact on society than one would think.

The most interesting aspect to this story, to me, is that movies back then we're nothing like this. They were mostly narrative with no real effects. They narration is where all the suspense and drama came from, just like a radio show. So, this wasn't just some guy mimicking a modern action or horror movie, because there was nothing like this. His style is where most of the action cut sequences and picture frame movie styles come from. I imagine that this did inspire a lot of people.

I like it when artists come in from outside of comics and comics from around the world and bring a different vision to add to that midia.