Article I promised one Friday to talk about how the editor-in-chief of “Funny Pictures” almost got burned by insects - in the most literal sense of the word.
Today is Friday, but first I would like to say a few words about “Funny Pictures” themselves - this unique case of creating a successful media.
The magazine has a clearly fixed birthday - September 24, 1956. On this day, the first issue of the magazine “Funny Pictures”, the first Soviet magazine for preschoolers, was published.
A happy (and large) father was the decree of the party and government “On the development of children's literature and children's periodicals,” issued at the beginning of 1956. A few months after its appearance, the number of children’s magazines in the country doubled - already in September, the company added “Young Technician”, “Young Naturalist” and “Veselye Kartinki” to the company “Murzilka”, “Pioneer” and “Kostr”, which published their first issues . This is what the debut looked like.
To say that the initiative was successful is to say nothing. The circulation of “Funny Pictures” at its best reached 9 million 700 thousand copies. At the same time, it was not just successful - it was an extremely profitable media project. Despite the penny price of 15 kopecks, it brought huge profits to its founder - the Central Committee of the Komsomol. The magazine’s employees liked to boast that “Funny Pictures” alone earned more money than all the magazines of the Molodaya Gvardiya publishing house.
What are the reasons for success?
Firstly, the small scale of the project. In my deep conviction, all breakthroughs are made where there are no large budgets, where there are no plans to distribute medals, where no one from the authorities calls, puts pressure or pulls.
“Funny Pictures” was created as a small niche project from which no one expected anything special. The best indicator of the boss's attitude was the office of the editor-in-chief. Ivan Semenov came to VK from Krokodil, where the editor-in-chief had a huge nomenklatura office with “turntables”. In “Pictures” he had a small closet, which he shared with the publication’s response section, so he didn’t even draw in his office, but went to the common room, where there were special tables for artists.
Secondly, creative freedom. “Funny Pictures” was the only publication in the USSR that was not published. All published magazines were brought to the censors at Glavlit, even “Fish Farming and Fisheries,” even the magazine “Concrete and Reinforced Concrete.” There was such a thing, but what? Now you laugh, but the circulation, bai ze wei, reached 22 thousand copies, one and a half thousand of which were sold for foreign currency to foreign subscribers.
And no one carried “Funny Pictures” anywhere.
Thirdly, the leader. According to the norms of those years, the editor-in-chief had to be a party member. The problem was that there were almost no communists among the artists - at all times they were freemen. As a result, the famous artist Ivan Semenov, who was a member of the party, but definitely not a career communist, was appointed editor-in-chief of Funny Pictures. Ivan Maksimovich joined the All-Union Communist Party (Bolsheviks) at the front in 1941, when the Germans were marching east, and communists who were captured were shot on the spot.
According to the memoirs, this former naval sailor and handsome man was an ideal leader of creative people. I never shook hands, and only asked about the outcome - but here I asked harshly. And he also had one important quality for the head of a media project - he was an unusually calm person. It was almost impossible to piss him off. The artist Anatoly Mikhailovich Eliseev, who worked at VK from the first day, told me such a case in an interview.
Semyonov was famous for his multi-figure compositions, such as, for example:
One day, one of the magazine’s artists brought from Finland a lead blot purchased in a “joke shop” that was indistinguishable from the real thing. We decided to play a prank on the editor-in-chief, who, as usual, was drawing in the common room. They waited until Semenov had almost finished the composition, filled his pipe and went out to smoke - and placed a blot on the almost finished drawing.
Semyonov is back. Saw. He stood up like a pillar. He chewed his lips. He dropped something dark and heavy, like a cobblestone: “Assholes!”
He moved the “ruined” drawing to the next table, sighed, took out a blank sheet of paper and, looking to the right, began to draw everything again.
In general, I ruined the prank for people.
But much more important than party affiliation was the fact that Semenov, both according to official and unofficial ratings, was considered one of the best book graphic artists in the country and therefore was a very authoritative person in the professional environment.
"It’s bad, brother, you know the Magyars!” Illustration by I. Semenov for “The Good Soldier Schweik”
This allowed him to assemble the fourth component of success - a team. Already in the first issue, funny pictures were drawn by the best children's graphic artists in the country: Konstantin Rotov, who came up with the appearance of the old man Hottabych and Captain Vrungel, Alexey Laptev, who drew the classic Dunno, Vladimir Suteev (classic illustrations for Cipollino, although why am I bashing, who doesn’t know Suteev?) , the aforementioned Anatoly Eliseev. In the first year, they were joined by Aminadav Kanevsky, Viktor Chizhikov, Anatoly Sazonov, Evgeny Migunov and a whole constellation of first-magnitude stars.
Well, the last component is production technology. To produce the magazine, Semyonov quite successfully imported and adapted the “crocodile” system for preparing issues, built on the principle “coming up with a joke and drawing a joke are different types of brain activity.” No, there are, of course, exceptions, like Viktor Chizhikov, who came up with most of his projects in VK, starting with the debut “About the girl Masha and the doll Natasha,” but on the whole...
This is how this system was described by Felix Shapiro, editor of the magazine “Funny Pictures” from 1956 to 1993:
Among the magazine’s employees were the so-called “themists” - those who are good at coming up with stories to draw and can share them with others. Our theme team were brilliant. (For example, the famous director Alexander Mitta began as the theme artist in “Funny Pictures” - VN) They came to the so-called “dark meetings” with their sketches. The meetings took place in a room with many, many chairs and only one table. Ivan Maksimovich was sitting at the table. He looked at everyone and asked: “Well, who is brave?” One of the thematic artists would come out and give him their sketches. He showed them to everyone present and monitored the reaction: if people smiled, the sketches were put aside. If there was no reaction, go to another one.
According to stories, they sometimes walked out of “dark meetings” laughing to the point of hysteria. And in general, judging by the memoirs, the working atmosphere in “Funny Pictures” was most reminiscent of the Strugatskys’ “Monday Begins on Saturday” - with practical jokes, teasing, periodic drinking of famous drinks, but most importantly - reckless love for their work.
They made the best children's magazine in the world and wouldn't settle for anything less.
A magazine where, for example, comics outlandish for the Soviet Union were published from the very beginning, and this is not a figure of speech. Here is Semenov’s famous “Petya Ryzhik” from the first issue:
A magazine with which the best artists in the world did not hesitate to collaborate: Jean Effel from France, Raoul Verdini from Italy, Herluf Bidstrup from Denmark.
However, sometimes international cooperation turned into serious troubles. So, at the end of August 1968, an unremarkable issue of “Funny Pictures” was published.
Where, among other things, was the innocent fairy tale of the Czech writer Vaclav Čtvrtek (how do they pronounce these last names?) “Two Bugs.” Here she is:
And everything would be fine, but it was at the moment of publication of the magazine that the famous “Prague Spring” ends with the introduction of army formations from the countries of the socialist commonwealth into Czechoslovakia.
Operation Danube begins, Russians, Poles and the aforementioned Magyars drive tanks around the Czech capital, Czechs build barricades, frontier Yevtushenko composes the poem “Tanks are moving through Prague,” dissidents stage a demonstration on Red Square, enemy voices howl in shifts on all radio frequencies, the KGB stands on ears and seems to have been transferred to a barracks position.
And at this time, “Funny Pictures” tell the entire Soviet Union that there are now a lot of birds in Prague that are pecking Czech insects and therefore they need to get out of Prague.
In those days, heads flew for less - “Technology for Youth” was almost closed in the much more vegetarian Chernenkov times.
In “Funny Pictures,” as the most astute already guessed, the mess that happened was aggravated by the lack of censorship. To send the issue to the printing house, the signature of the editor-in-chief was enough.
But this also meant that he, too, would be responsible for everything.
As the employees recalled, for about two weeks it was as if a dead man was lying in the editorial office - everyone was moving along the wall and speaking exclusively in a whisper. Semyonov sat locked in his office, violating his own ban, smoking incessantly and hypnotizing the phone.
Then they began to slowly exhale.
Carried.
Did not notice.
And if anyone noticed, they didn’t snitch.
We still loved Semyonov’s magazine. They loved it very much. Both children and their parents.
In order not to end with this Soviet insanity, a few words about the absolutely brilliant idea with the “Merry Men Club” and the most famous character of Ivan Semyonov.
Even at the stage of creating the magazine, he came up with a mascot for the magazine - a shaggy magical artist in a black hat, blue blouse and red bow.
And then they decided to find him a company - famous fairy-tale characters who would hang out from room to room. The first composition of the Club had only five members: Karandash, Buratino, Cipollino, Petrushka and Gurvinek.
And in the very first issue, young readers began to be introduced to them, starting, naturally, with the permanent chairman.
If Semenov’s comrades knew that their random idea, made on their knees, would become a real cultural phenomenon, that cartoons would be made about the “Merry Men Club” and scientific articles would be written, that several generations of people would grow up on it.
People who today draw philosophical, I would say, caricatures. Like this one I call "The Living and the Dead."
Pencil starred in five cartoons,
became the hero of countless books,
To this day it remains the mascot of the magazine “Funny Pictures” and the most famous creation of the great children's artist Ivan Semyonov.
It is no coincidence that, for example, Viktor Chizhikov, who began working in “Funny Pictures” as a third-year student at the Moscow Printing Institute, invariably drew his teacher with his favorite character. For example:
Or this:
It is curious that on the other side of the Earth, in Australia, lives the twin brother of our Pencil. Also in a blouse and with a bow.
Anticipating the inevitable questions - our Pencil is three years older, the Australian magic artist appeared in 1959. The clone's name is Mister Squiggle, and he was the star of a show of the same name that ran on Australian television for forty years, from 1959 to 1999.
Mr. Squiggle is a puppet with a pencil instead of a nose, who at first completed the “scribbles” sent by children and turned them into full-fledged paintings, and then grew into his own hour and a half show with invited guests and concert numbers.
In February 2019, grateful Australians released a series of $60 coins to celebrate the XNUMXth anniversary of their iconic childhood character.
And our Pencil didn’t even receive a postage stamp for his anniversary.
In all my memory there is only sincere gratitude to the former October students for a happy childhood.
Source: habr.com