Earl Engleman
Earl Engleman (1927-2012) was a prolific career gag cartoonist whose work stands out for its wild over-the-top humor. He was a World War II Army vet from Philadelphia who began drawing single page cartoons for the New York City based Humorama digest publications in the late 1950s. His style is ink line based and he never relied on washes, crayons, or over-rendering. Therefore it lacks the flash of the more well-known artists of this stable like Bill Ward or Jack Cole. I would most accurately describe his style as having a sort of cuteness that lay somewhere between Bil Keane and Syd Hoff. That accessibility is in style only, his subject matter is uniquely his own and in later years often shockingly offensive, sexist or absurd. Yet somehow, because of his simplicity of line that brings to mind some sort of childhood innocence, his cartoons are charming and funny. Whereas if the same subject were left to the hands of a less able artist they might just become gross (I’m thinking, for example, the vulgar cartoons of Pete Wyma). It is this duality that make Engleman’s cartoons fascinating and ahead of their time.
By the 1980s Engleman, then living in Florida, had worked in the mainstream market having literally hundreds of gags published in such reputable publications such as Good Housekeeping, Saturday Evening Post, Better Homes and Gardens and believe it or not, a few Scholastic books publications. However, the work I will be referring to in this article, which is the bulk of Engleman’s output, is from largely forgotten men’s magazines. While his work did appear in the Humorama books, which have since become collectible, he was at the tail end of that market in the late 1950s. When men’s magazines exploded into the 1960’s with the sexual revolution, they indeed became raunchier. Several popular magazine cartoonists who prior to the Vietnam War were making cartoons mostly for adults, shifted their focus to the more lucrative children’s book marketplace. Engleman however, hung on, and continued contributing to an oversaturated and largely unprofitable nudie magazine market with his strangely sweet looking cartoons that left no taboo untouched. Unlike some other cartoonists, Engleman seems to embrace this fate. His work never appeared in the more high-profile venues such as Playboy but if Engleman was discerning it is not apparent. In the cheap 1970's cartoon market of gag digests such as Army Fun, Zowie, Jackpot and Broadway Laughs, what Engleman had was freedom and what he contributed was from a largely separate (albeit older) perspective from the burgeoning counterculture of underground comics.
Engleman’s delectable characters inhabit an oversexed world full of 1950s cliches such as cute secretaries, horny doctors and whistling soldiers. Like most adult cartoons from that period, sex is fairly innocent in his world, free of both the complications of actual relationships or consequences of diseases. What makes Engleman’s cartoons different, however, is his absurdist slant. On one cover for Jackpot magazine, a spritey redheaded woman is impossibly perched on top of a hunter’s backpack, legs spread while he talks to his friend in the woods with a coonskin hat. “Where’d you get that neat beaver,” asks the jovial fellow.
In another cover, this time for Broadway Laughs in 1976, a man atop a pile of nude hippy bodies exclaims “Mom would be proud of me, I finally made it to the top of the class.”
This sort of humor would later find a new, if perhaps even smaller, audience more than twenty years later in the work of Ivan Brunetti or Johnny Ryan published by Fantagraphics Books as alternative comics. Engleman didn’t just draw well-endowed cuties, he took the humor less literally and made the cartoons more of the exaggerated stretch and pull variety. In one image a woman karate chops a man, knocking him out with her obscene breasts. In another, a soldier sits aboard a tank reading a book on “sex fantasies” as the phallic gun projects from between his legs. The juxtaposition of his simple line and the flat fields of bright circus colors with this peculiar subject matter are certainly a shock to the eyes.
I also find the color choices of his covers from the 1970s to be particularly good when he omits some of the linework in place of flat color shapes. Of course this is common practice today with vector illustration, but it also looked great and innovative when Engleman was doing it over forty years ago.
As the digests began to disappear in the late 1970s, Engleman’s work persisted in such magazines as Sex to Sexty where he had the fraternity of being amongst many of his 1960s era cartoonist has-beens such as Charles Dennis, who also had a wicked sense of humor. At times, the subject matter seems to take a dark turn. In one cartoon, a man humps a woman in an antique store amidst a sign that reads “If you break it, you pay for it”. In another, a salary man has a hard time getting it up as sales plummet. Perhaps Engleman's last venue was the magazine Hustler Humor, a subsidiary publication of the Flynt empire where his cartoons appeared up through the 1980s.
But clearly, Engleman is not one solely cut out for dark humor. His cartoons have a range although that range often veers to the edge of what can be considered proper. His more optimistic cartoons are some of my personal favorites.
Take the two examples below, culled form some of the later issues of Sex to Sexty. Two undressed young people are about to “do it” on the couch when suddenly the girl’s parents arrive home. The father shakes the boy’s hand in introduction and remarks, “Any friend of my daughter’s is a friend of mine”. In another, a man approaches his wife for sex while she is suspended in traction in a hospital bed. He says excitedly, “Your accident isn’t going to interfere with our honeymoon, after all.”
So I hope I have made it clear why Earl Engleman isn’t a household name, as far as cartoonists go. His outrageous cartoons seem to inhabit the same world as other odd cultural phenomenon of the 1970s like Jack's Hill's film The Swinging Cheerleaders or Kin Platt's novel The Terrible Love Life of Dudley Cornflower. These are works of humor that feel tuned into an existential or nihilistic viewpoint. Combine this with a firsthand observer's commentary of freedom in an uninhibited age. What you get is a man in his mid-forties making an outright lurid and fascinating commentary on culture through his cartoons. It's a snapshot of another time through an uncommon perspective. While these cartoons did little damage at the time, the world since certainly has not been the same.
I’ve compiled a PDF sampling of Engleman’s cartoons from my collection. Please note that this is “adults only” cartoon content.