In my previous post in honor of Shark Week, I showed some of the classic stories and artwork included in MANEATERS: KILLER SHARKS IN MEN’S ADVENTURE MAGAZINES, one of the books in the Men’s Adventure Library series I co-edit with Wyatt Doyle.
As Wyatt and I were putting MANEATERS together in 2020, the great illustration artist Mort Künstler was still alive. (He passed in 2025, at age 97.)
We had previously done a book featuring Mort’s original men’s adventure magazine paintings, MORT KÜNSTLER: THE GODFATHER OF PULP FICTION ILLUSTRATORS.
We borrowed that “Godfather” title from the title of an awesome exhibit of Mort’s paintings at the Heckscher Museum of Art in Huntington, New York.
It featured scores of his MAM cover and interior paintings, including those Mort did for the “Book Bonus” version of his friend Mario Puzo’s novel THE GODFATHER in MALE, August 1969. (You can see the video made to promote the exhibit on YouTube at this link.)
The Hecksher exhibit was curated by Michael W. Schantz, Ph.D., Executive Director of the museum. He graciously let us use the show’s title as the subtitle for our book and wrote an introduction for it.
When the book was published in 2019, we had the honor of visiting Mort at his home in Oyster Bay and attending the show with Mort, his wife Deborah Künstler, his daughter Jane Künstler, and his archivist, Linda Swanson.
Deborah was Mort’s model for many of his men’s adventure magazine illustrations, including the one we used on the cover of the deluxe hardcover edition.)
That trip is one of my fondest memories.
The following year, we got Mort’s permission to include a special section in MANEATERS featuring him and his shark-related artwork.
We titled it “The Godfather Meets Jaws: Mort Künstler’s Big Blues and Great Whites.”
The text we used for it is commentary by Mort that Wyatt recorded in phone calls with him.
To continue my celebration of Shark Week, I’m posting Mort’s quotes from that section below, along with scans of the pages that go with it.
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Mort Künstler’s commentary in MANEATERS:
“Every experience you have, you file away. Painting underwater scenes, I had to get an underwater effect. I had done some scuba diving and fishing in Florida and in Mexico…on Long Island, even. And that’s where I came up with many of the underwater effects I utilized; I’d seen them first-hand.”
“So you’ll never see true white in underwater scenes; what’s white underwater is going to have a tint to it: blue-to-green, gray, green-gray, blue-gray…”
“There were some great underwater displays at the Museum of Natural History in New York; I remember taking many reference photos there. But most of the time you had to make it up, because [reality] never fit the way you wanted it.”
“What it amounts to is, you take a photo that’s basically gonna help you do the picture. The guys that just take a photo, trace it up and then render it? It looks like it. What it has to be is an aid to help you get to the end result. You take advantage of what technology there is, but you don’t let the technology rule you.”
“I think it probably helped that I was active myself. I’d even been in the water with sharks. (I was scared to death.)”
“At times I was my own model. ADVENTURE, August 1956? That’s me. Aside from the fact that he looks like me (you don’t see my face, but that’s my body, my hands), the guy is a lefty—and I’m a lefty.”
“My attitude was, it’s not realistic to begin with. Sharks, you made about three times bigger than they were, so they would look vicious, etcetera. Not that they don’t look vicious already! But the shark is pretty easy. There’s not an awful lot you can do with them, you know? I mean, you can have their mouth open, you can do them sideways, then you can do the other side, full-front…. Each time I did one of these, I tried to do a different angle on the shark, so it didn’t look like the last painting.”
“For the 1975 MAD magazine cover [#180, actually dated January 1976], they showed me the JAWS poster and said they wanted to do a take-off on that. It was pretty easy. You make it funny, with the tongue hanging out on the shark, and Alfred E. Neuman…. Apparently they’d had a difficult time finding artists who could paint Alfred.”
“They wanted him exactly the same every time; you weren’t supposed to have him in profile or anything like that. Norman Mingo was the artist who’d established the character, and it’s almost always the same angle and the same head. How other artists had trouble with it is beyond my comprehension. That’s the easiest part of the job! And that’s what they really loved: my rendering of Alfred. The shark was no big deal!”
“They wanted me to take over their covers, and do every one. I felt at the time it was, I don’t know, beneath my dignity. Ha! That’s why I signed it Mutz. (My father didn’t like the name Morton. He told my mother, “If you call him Morton, I’m gonna call him Mutt,” and Mutt—then Mutz—it’s been, ever since.)”
“It was pretty foolish when I think back; it would have been fun. But I was doing a lot of work in advertising then, and I’d think, “No advertiser’s going to want to be associated with Mad Magazine!” Which is sort of silly, but what did I know?”
“I did keep busy, though!”
To see more shark art by Mort and other top illustration artists and read classic shark stories they illustrated, get a copy of MANEATERS: KILLER SHARKS IN MEN’S ADVENTURE MAGAZINES.
It’s available in deluxe hardcover and paperback editions on Amazon worldwide, from BudsArtBooks.com, and directly from me via my MensPulpMags.com bookstore or my eBay listings.
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Comments? Corrections? You can email them to me, or join the Men’s Adventure Magazines & Books Facebook Group or the MEN’S ADVENTURE QUARTERLY BRIGADE group and post them there.
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