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George Mandel – RIP

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D. D. Degg March 18, 2021 1 minute 2 comments

It is being reported that author and cartoonist George Mandel has passed away.

George Mikali Mandel
February 11, 1920 – February 13, 2021

From the March 18, 2021 Shelf Awareness notice:

George Mikali Mandel, the author and cartoonist who was an early member of the Beat Generation, died last month in New York. He was 101.

Born in New York City in 1920, Mandel worked as a cartoonist prior to World War II. He was wounded in combat in the war and received the Purple Heart Medal. He published his first novel, Flee the Angry Strangers, in 1952.

Over the course of his career he wrote novels with widely varied subjects, such as Scapegoats, about racial tensions in New York City, Crocodile Blood, a multigenerational saga set in Florida, and the war novels Into the Woods of the World and The Wax Boom. He also wrote short stories, and his cartoons were published in two collections: Beatville U.S.A. and Borderline Cases.

Wikipedia notes that he was an early writer of The Beat Generation:

His novels, interviews, novellas, cartoons and short stories have been carried major print magazines and collections. He has also contributed key elements to screenplays for Hollywood films.

As a teenager George began his short comics career training in the art shops of the day that supplied stories for the nascent modern comic book industry. By 1940 he was drawing on his own and contributed to comic books until he went into the service in December 1941.  Among the highlights is his drawing of one of the first female superheroes (in the sense that Batman was a costumed “super” hero).

After the war George returned to comic books for a very short time. As he described it in a 1952 article on the debut of his Flee the Angry Strangers novel:

While succeeding in becoming an author, George didn’t completely give up his other artistic abilities.

In the early 1960s George came up with a couple mass market paperbacks of gag cartoons. 
Mike Lynch is kind enough to give us a look at Beatville U.S.A. from 1961.

George began his comic book career laying out his stories in the staid eight panels per page standard of the time. Fairly quickly he was experimenting with the designs of a comics page and violating border protocols. This lead to a 1942 story (probably done not long before joining the Army) where all the rules were thrown out the window. Below is the eight page Blue Bolt the American: Wanted. Clicking on the images and then clicking again should supersize the pages to reading size, or go to the (hat tip) Digital Comic Museum and read it there.