KRIGSTEIN'S SWAN SONG: BLIND MAN'S BLUFF

 "BLIND MAN'S BLUFF"

by Lionel Ziprin and Bernie Krigstein
(Four Color #1309: 87th Precinct, Dell Comics, 1962)

review by BK MUNN

Bernard Krigstein is best known for the 44 short stories he illustrated for EC, and 

especially his magnum opus "Master Race" (1955), but he also did very strong, 

interesting work for Timely/Atlas and, near the end of his frustrating career in the 

American funnybook industry, several stories for Dell Comics. In fact, his final 

comic book work is a bizarre, 32-page occult epic disguised as a run-of-the-mill genre 

exercise hiding under a photo cover for a licensed tv show. The story is "Blind Man's 

Bluff" and it was written by one of the most fascinating writers ever to work in U.S.

mainstream comics, Lionel Ziprin.

Ziprin, the Beat poet, occultist, artist and filmmaker, briefly supported himself in the 

early 1960s writing comic scripts. He described his work in typically hyperbolic terms:

"Dell made contracts with all the movie companies and I wrote a series of comic books on every battle in the Pacific and European theatres. They gave me the theme, or movies would come out, big movies; they handed me the script, and I had to put it into comic book form. All I got was ten dollars a page: six boxes, balloons and lines, and I had to sign away everything, that it was not my property, no credit. But I was America’s best-selling writer of comic books, my comic books sold in the millions of copies."

Ziprin was not above slipping the occasional Kabalistic reference into the kids comics he wrote, and seemed to relish the rare opportunity to cut loose and freewheel-it with some of his science fiction and fantasy assignments. When he was handed the job of adapting the now-forgotten police procedural tv series 87th Precinct, based on the Ed McBain novels, Ziprin cooked up a convoluted tale about a psychotic blind artist who kills his models. Perhaps because Ziprin was, like the villain in his story, a visual artist who also fancied himself a wizard, the script is loaded with weird meditations on art and the occult, providing plenty of meaty opportunities for his illustrator to go wild, and this is just what Krigstein does.

Krigstein and Ziprin were a perfect match. He called Ziprin's script “the most fantastically absurd story that has ever been typed or presented to an artist for a breakdown,”  and his resulting finished pages display a level of graphic inventiveness and full-throttle cartooning rarely seen in his oeuvre. Police cars scoot around in Duchamp-ian blurs, the mad ravings of the artist are represented with cartoon lightning bolts and emanata bouncing off the inside of his skull, and the act of artistic creation is rendered in a series of largely wordless panels full of manic action and swirling, slashing movement. Eyeballs are everywhere, and Krigstein looks like he's having a ball. The pedestrian framing device to all this madness, the squad of police detectives searching for a killer, is not without its charms, either; Krigstein's caricatures of the tv actors have a wild, wide-eyed look, and angular, sloping body language, like everyone in the pocket universe of this comic is slightly unhinged and off-balance. The full story is worth checking out, and its themes are a fitting coda for Krigstein's brief Sisyphean effort to expand the artistic frontiers of corporate comics storytelling.