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Bernard Krigstein, was an American illustrator and gallery artist who received acclaim for his innovative and influential approach to comic book art, notably in EC Comics. He was known as Bernie Krigstein, and his artwork usually displayed the signature B. Krigstein.
He was posthumously inducted into the comic book industry's Jack Kirby Hall of Fame in 1992 and the Will Eisner Comic Book Hall of Fame in 2005.
Born in Brooklyn, New York, Krigstein was trained as a classical painter.
Krigstein's best known work in comic books is the short story "Master Race", originally published in the debut issue of EC Comics' Impact. The protagonist is a former Nazi death camp commandant named Reissman who had managed to elude justice until he is spotted ten years later riding a New York subway. This story was remarkable for its subject matter, since the Holocaust was rarely discussed in popular media of the 1950s, as indicated by the controversy that same year surrounding Alain Resnais's Night and Fog.
Krigstein, who sometimes chafed at the limits of the material EC gave him to illustrate, expanded what had been planned for six-pages into an eight-page story. The results were so striking that the company reworked the issue to accommodate the two extra pages. Krigstein had stretched out certain sequences in purely visual terms; repetitive strobe-like drawings mimic the motion of a passing train, and Commandant Reissman's final moment of life is broken down into four individual poses of desperate physical struggle. Art Spiegelman described the effect in The New Yorker: "The two tiers of wordless staccato panels that climax the story... have often been described as 'cinematic', a phrase thoroughly inadequate to the achievement: Krigstein condenses and distends time itself... Reissman's life floats in space like the suspended matter in a lava lamp. The cumulative effect carries an impact—simultaneously visceral and intellectual—that is unique to comics."
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