A LAST LOOK AT THE AUSTIN BRIGGS ARCHIVES part one

One of the joys of writing the biography of illustrator Austin Briggs was getting to know and interview his son, Austin Briggs Jr.,  a retired professor of literature and a nationally renowned expert on James Joyce.  Austin Jr. generously shared his father's personal collection of tear sheets and memorabilia containing thousands of images that wouldn't fit in the book.

Now the time has come for me to relinquish that collection.  Once I pass it along to the museum selected by the Briggs family, this amazing stash of images will be well protected but I'm not sure the larger public will ever get a chance to view them.  Many of them are unsigned.  So before I let them go, I'm going to post a large batch of Briggs' forgotten works here for posterity. 

The following images, dating back to the 1920s and 1930s, are not all masterpieces, but they do show the development of a major talent responding to changing times and changing media. 

Briggs drew his first published work at age 18:

 

Like other young and ambitious illustrators of that era, he worked for pulp magazines and tabloids that once crowded the newsstands but are now long forgotten.  

By 1930, Briggs (now using the name "Bud") was illustrating stories like this lurid tale about the wife of gangster Baby Face Nelson ("His heart was so black with malice that he shot wantonly and with strange pleasure"). 

 

"She helped wrap his nude body in a horse blanket and dropped it in a ditch.  He was the father of her children but she couldn't get far with a body on her hands."  

From a Harper's Bazar story, The Girl Who Was The Moon (June 1929):

By the mid 1930s, Briggs was supplementing his work for pulp magazines by assisting Alex Raymond on his epic comic strip, Flash Gordon.  We can see how Briggs' work for Bluebook and other pulp magazines paralleled his work on Flash Gordon, and how Briggs' drybrush technique influenced the look of Flash Gordon.  

As I post more of these forgotten works tomorrow, I think you'll see how Briggs inched out of the ranks of a typical pulp artist to become one of the premier illustrators in America.

After Briggs' died, his friend Tom Holloway gave the following memorial tribute:

 

In my many years of association with him I remember few jobs that came easy for him... if they did, his intuition told him something must be wrong, or that he was getting in a rut, and he would do something hard-- not always a success either in the product or the acceptance by client-- but he was slugging most of the time.