FOUR GIL KANE STORIES...
...Posted here on Substack for the first time.
These three anecdotes first saw the light on Facebook.
I post them here to buy me some time as I continue my mission of tributes…
In 1984, First Comics threw a party at a Mexican restaurant in Chicago, to celebrate its first anniversary, during the Chicago Comicon. All the professional guests of the show were invited, and, as was the way at the time, the men were all wearing suits, or jackets, and neckties, and the women were in cocktail dresses.
Leslie, my then wife, and I navigated the buffet, anticipating high comedy from Gil Kane, who we both knew regarded any spice beyond salt as an affront to his palate, which had atrophied at the age of six.
We were sympathetic, having spent evenings with Gil and Elaine at a German restaurant in Yorkville called the Kleine Konditerei, which served as bland a menu as you could find in New York City, outside of a nursing home.
As we loaded our plates, I pointed out to Leslie a woman, a few people ahead of us, who supplied paper to First Comics. I whispered to my wife that despite the fact that this woman was far from what could be called conventionally attractive, there was something about her, some frisson of sensuality, that seemed to surround her with an atmosphere of desirability.
Leslie dismissed this as nonsense, unable to see what I saw and I thought no more of it.
A few minutes later we’d made our way through the crowd, to find the Kanes at a table. We joined them, and chatted a bit, sympathizing with Gil’s distaste for everything on everyone’s plate. In a brief lull in the conversation—such lulls in conversations with Gil were very rare—I said, and I paraphrase, “There’s a woman we just saw on the buffet line-“
--And before I could finish the sentence, Gil chimed in with “Oh, yes, my boy—she just radiates carnality.”
I was only a little surprised at this shared moment.
That said, until the end of our marriage, Leslie continued to assume she’d been set up.
In 1994, the Northridge earthquake tore ass through southern California, hitting the San Fernando Valley with its maximum impact. My wife Laurel and I lived in Sherman Oaks at the time, and our neighborhood was really shaken to its literal foundations.
We watched jets of blue erupt from gas mains across the Valley from our bedroom, and were naturally and abruptly without power or telephone connectivity. We avoided injury, while our house seemed to maintain its verticality on a couple of columns of rebar.
Others of our neighbors weren’t quite so lucky. Harlan Ellison, who lived a few blocks south of us, fell down a flight of stairs, breaking his nose and fracturing his arm.
A few days after the event, with power restored, we began making contact with our friends and family. Among those was Gil, who lived then on the west side in Brentwood, a neighborhood virtually untouched by the earthquake.
We shared the inventory of what damage had been done, confirming that at least for that moment, we were all okay.
Then after that rare momentary lull, Gil said, and this is a quote, “So, my boy—did you hear about Harlan.”
I replied, “I did.”
There was then another momentary lull, followed by, and again, an exact quote, “There is a god.”
Back in the late 1970s/early 1980s, Anne and Archie Goodwin, along with Allen and Judy Milgrom, Walter and Weeezie Simonson, and my then wife Leslie Zahler and I were an informal supper club, hosting each other at dinner parties for an occasional while.
Stories were told around the table, most forgotten, but the announcement of Anne’s death reminded me of an anecdote she told, at Archie’s encouragement, about a weekend she and Archie had spent with Gil and Elaine Kane a few weeks previous.
Unlike most of his contemporaries, Gil had both personal and professional relationships with colleagues of the generations that followed his own.
Gil and Archie were friends, and I’d be willing to bet that Anne and Elaine, Gil’s second wife, having nothing in common but their spouses, were patient with the relationship shared by their husbands, and little more.
At any rate, Anne related that she’d awakened in the middle of night, and needed a bathroom. She rose, in an unfamiliar house, and walked through the silence, to a door at the end of the hall, and opened that door, presuming, or perhaps hoping, it was the toilet.
She tentatively turned on the light in the room, to find, not a bathroom, but an unused bedroom, empty…but for a half dozen columns, five feet high, of blank DC and Marvel paper.
I cracked up, and still smile at the memory.
Draw your own conclusions.
In the year that I spent as Gil’s gofer and assistant, there were three days in which he stopped work in the mid afternoon.
In no particular order—because we’re talking more than a half century ago, and things do have a tendency to slip away…
One day, after lunch, Gil announced we were not working from 2 until 4. This, in those pre DVD, VHS, internet era, was so that he—and incidentally we—could watch a movie, that apparently didn’t show up often enough for Gil to have seen recently.
The movie was 1944’s COVER GIRL, a musical starring Gene Kelly, Rita Hayworth and Phil Silvers. We watched it on a yellow plastic PANASONIC black and white portable, with a nine inch screen.
What followed, interrupted by commercials, was what we’d now call a livestream annotation of this picture, with particular insight in regard to Gene Kelly, his relationship with Fred Astaire, that other great dancer of the era—and how and why his dancing, his choreography, his presentation, in Gil’s description, of an urban cavalier—had profoundly influenced his own depiction of movement.
As banal, as trivial, as mundane as this may sound in description, this experience was genuinely transformative. My skillsets were a decade away from being competitive, but everything I heard that afternoon has informed my experience of the depiction of movement in deep space.
A decade later, as we watched Bob Fosse’s DANCIN’, my then wife and I both remarked that the dancers performing RODEO seemed to be the living incarnation of Gil Kane figures in motion.
One day, after lunch, Gil turned to me and asked who in comics did work I liked. Like an idiot, I didn’t identify the minefield that awaited me.
I began the list, and what followed should have shut me up immediately, but I kept going.
With what I’m sure were at least a few exceptions, none of which I recall—really—he dismissed my every enthusiasm with cruel, vicious and snide one liners. None of these are repeatable in a public venue, even in regard to those he dismissed who are now among the dead. And believe you me, there are some classics.
All this would be damning, if, to be very clear, Gil’s capacity for self-criticism ran deep. It was his all too realistic estimation and understanding of his own skillsets that underpinned the striving for self improvement that might be best seen as beginning with his rhinoplasty.
He transformed himself from an ungainly kid from Brooklyn into the equivalent of a character from a NEW YORKER cartoon by Charles Saxon—perhaps not so coincidentally another nice Jewish boy who reinvented himself as a Connecticut brahmin.
And speaking of Connecticut, and brahmins…
One day, after lunch, Gil announced that he would now give me a list of all the Anti-Semites in comics. Not that I asked, but this sounded juicy.
He then laid out a long list of names, some of whom were familiar, some who I’d met personally, and most from the world of newspaper strips, as opposed to comics. I paid attention, and although I didn’t write down any names, I have pretty good recall.
About a decade later, I was out for dinner at PALM 2, a legendary steak house on 2nd Ave in New York, its walls, like those of its parent, covered with cartoons. I slipped away from the table to hit the bathroom, and halfway down the stairs, I stopped dead, at the sight of what I recall as a wall size drawing of a signature character drawn by one of those topping the list of Jew baiters.
I told my then wife about my reaction, and she cracked up…
…And we both laughed, only a few weeks later, when, over dinner with Gil and Elaine, it became clear that a big chunk of those Anti-Semites in that list were the same people they had cocktails in Connecticut nearly every Friday night.
I can’t make this up.