B. Kliban
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Bernard "Hap" Kliban (January 1, 1935 – August 12, 1990) was an influential cartoonist born in New York.
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[edit] Early life and education
He studied at the Pratt Institute and spent time painting and traveling in Europe before moving to California, where he lived in the North Beach section of San Francisco with his wife Mary Kathleen and his daughter Kalia. The former was his first wife and a talented artist who later also became a noted cartoonist in her own right as M.K. Brown, and chose many of the cartoons that appeared in his publications. It was while living in North Beach that "Hap" Kliban began to draw cartoons for Playboy magazine. The income from Playboy provided financial security that allowed him to move his family to an old house in the town of Fairfax in Marin County.
[edit] Career
In 1962, Kliban became a Playboy cartoonist, contributing cartoons until his death. He is best-known for the book Cat, a collection of cartoons about cats drawn in Kliban's distinctive style. The cat cartoons were discovered by a Playboy editor and the 1975 book Cat was born. This led to several other books of cartoons ending with Advanced Cartooning in 1993. Since Cat, his cartoons have adorned many products including stickers, calendars, mugs, and t-shirts.
The books that followed Cat consisted mostly of extremely bizarre cartoons that find their humor in their utter strangeness and unlikeliness. Many of these are cartoons that Kliban drew for Playboy. They often contained dysmorphic drawings of nude figures in extremely unlikely environments, as if to spoof Playboy's own subject matter. Kliban also had a recurring series of drawings called "Sheer Poetry", in which the page would be split into six panels, containing random images of objects whose names, when spoken in the order presented, would form a rhyming, nonsensical verse.
[edit] Death
Bernard "Hap" Kliban died at the age of 55, two weeks after undergoing heart surgery at the University of California Medical Center in San Francisco. He was survived by his second wife Judith Kamman Kliban (who later married actor Bill Bixby shortly before Bixby's death in 1993) and two daughters: Kalia from his first marriage and Sarah.[citation needed]
[edit] Legacy
According to Art Spiegelman, Kliban invented the form of cartoon, popularized by Gary Larson and others, of a single panel with a third-person caption describing the action.[citation needed]
[edit] Books
- Cat, 1975 (ISBN 0-911104-54-2 (pb), 0-911104-87-9 (hb))
- Never Eat Anything Bigger Than Your Head and Other Drawings, 1976 (ISBN 0-911104-67-4)
- Whack Your Porcupine and Other Drawings, 1977 (ISBN 0-911104-92-5)
- Tiny Footprints, 1978 (ISBN 0-89480-031-0)
- Playboy's Kliban, 1979 (ISBN 0-87223-547-5)
- Playboy's New Kliban, 1980 (ISBN 0-87223-626-9)
- Catcalendar Cats; the Complete Collection, 1981 (ISBN 0-89480-169-4)
- Two Guys Fooling Around with the Moon, 1982 (ISBN 0-89480-198-8)
- Luminous Animals and Other Drawings, 1983 (ISBN 0-14-006861-9)
- The Biggest Tongue in Tunisia and Other Drawings, 1986 (ISBN 0-14-007220-9)
- Advanced Cartooning, 1993 (ISBN 0-8362-1710-1)
[edit] External links
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