Monday, November 26, 2018

Comics: Pablo Ferro, 1935–2018

Pablo Francisco Ferro was born on January 15, 1935, in Oriente Province, Cuba.

Ferro attended the School of Industrial Art and was in the Class of 1953. His address and specialty was “640 10 Ave., N. Y. 19 Cartooning”. One of his classmates was Victor Moscoso

Ferro became a naturalized citizen on June 10, 1957 according to the Index to Petitions for Naturalization, New York City, at Ancestry.com

The Comics Journal, #246, September 2002
Gary Groth interviewed Victor Moscoso

MOSCOSO: … Pablo Ferro is a high-school buddy of mine, who I looked up in ’67 and we hit it off. We were on the same wavelength. He was doing the titles for Dr. Strangelove, the refueling sequence, when the planes are hooking up together and the music is “Try A Little Tenderness,” and the final sequence, which is when the atom bomb goes off, and the song is “We’ll meet again, don’t know where, don’t know when ...” I thought that was Stanley Kubrick. It was Pablo Ferro. And I didn’t bother to look at the credit for who did the titles. And meanwhile he’s collecting my posters, especially my Neon Rose posters. But he doesn’t know they’re mine because he can’t read the signature. So we meet, and here we are digging each other’s work, not realizing it …

GROTH: You read Mad as a kid?
MOSCOSO: Not only did I read Mad as a kid, me and a couple of friends, like Pablo Ferro, went down to the EC offices on Lafayette Street hoping to meet Harvey Kurtzman and Wally Wood. Actually, they worked at home for the most part, but we did get to meet Al Feldstein and Jack Kamen, and Al Feldstein autographed a copy of Weird Science. I still have that somewhere….

GROTH: Let me talk a little about the artists that influenced your approach to comics. There’s obviously Winsor McCay.
MOSCOSO: Actually, he was not an influence until 1967. I was unaware of Winsor McCay’s work until then. At that point he became an influence. I had done a poster for Neiman Marcus in Dallas, called the Dallas Poster Show. In it, I have a flower-covered satellite with yellow forming a shadow to it which gives it a yin-yang shape, rising above a flower-covered planet. I looked into Winsor McCay about a month after I did that, when I went to New York. My friend, Pablo Ferro, who I did a poster for, had a McCay book — I think it was from Nostalgia Press. I looked at it, and McCay had this dirigible flying over this planet covered with lilies, and I said, “Holy shit.” He drew 50 years ago what I just drew. We were both going in the same direction, even though he was ancient. He was gone; he was art history, literally. So yes, he was an influence from that point on….

Against the Grain: Mad Artist Wallace Wood (2003)
Wood: My friend Pablo Ferro is working on selling Nudine as an animated cartoon and The Wizard King as a regular feature film. I’m sure it will happen eventually. I just hope it’s in my lifetime. Pablo Ferro drew EC-type horror stories about 30 years ago, just before he decided to give up comics and bought a camera. He has since worked on some very successful movies, including Dr. Strangelove, The Night They Raided Minsky’s and Bound for Glory

Ferro passed away November 16, 2018, in Sedona, Arizona.

Obituaries
The New York Times
Variety
Hollywood Reporter
Deadline
Cartoon Brew

Further Reading and Viewing
Pablo Ferro 
Art of the Title 
AIGA 
Art Directors Club 
The Atlantic, November 21, 2013 
Grand Comics Database 
Who’s Who of American Comic Books 1928–1999 
Wikipedia 


(Next post on Monday: It’s a Bird)


Monday, November 19, 2018

Monday, November 12, 2018