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"They don't know it, but this is the best artist who ever walked through these doors."
-Marie Severin on Kremer's visit to the Marvel Comics bullpen.
The most influential, prolific artist you never knew passed away Thursday, July 24th. Warren Kremer was born in the Bronx to a sign painter, and raised on the likes of Alex Raymond's Flash Gordon and Hal Foster's Prince Valiant. He graduated from the School of Industrial Arts, and moved on from there to ten years doing layout, lettering, and illustrations for pulp and aviation magazines. In 1948, soon after marrying his wife and longtime letterer Grace, he started freelancing for Harvey Comics. Kremer switched easily from cartoony to gruesome and back again, earning a top 5 position in Stephen Sennitt's horror comic survey for a particular exploding head cover. Kremer was soon offered a postion as Art Editor, a role he held through to the end of Harvey Comics first publication run in 1982.
You know, if Warren went into animation, we'd all have to leave our jobs!"
-Marty Taras
In addition to this, he contributed animation storyboards, pencilled, inked and coloured almost all the thousands of covers for every one of Harvey's humour titles and, according to his editor Sid Jacobson, Kremer could pencil 8 pages of interiors a day at his most productive. He created or defined many of the most well-known Harvey characters, including Richie Rich, Casper, Hot Stuff and Stumbo. All artists in the Harvey humour stable were instructed to emulate Kremer's style as best as they could. These numerous duties did nothing to detract from Kremer's quality. With big. bold compositions and a keen sense of contrast and colour, Kremer is one of the greatest graphic designers in the history of the medium.
Warren Kremer defined the kind of comic books that the industry is just now realizing it needs in order to survive in the long term, however the news of his passing has barely been noticed. It seems that the price of creating work and characters loved by millions, as opposed to being obsessed over by thousands, is relative obscurity. Here's hoping this short tribute to the Good Ghost Artist helps dispel that.
Mark Evanier, Journalista, Cartoon Research, EGON and Fumetti all also carried the story (scroll down for the last two). The majority of information for this post was taken from the Harvey issue of Comic Book Artist. The New Jersey Star-Ledger has a proper obituary. |
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