Ernie in Kovacsland

Kovacs worked in American television from 1950 until his death in a car accident in 1962 at 43, and in those twelve years he treated the medium as a formal playground that nobody else had thought to enter. He used the camera as a collaborator — tilting it to make furniture slide, using split screens before anyone had named the technique, building visual gags that only worked on television and nowhere else. He baffled network executives and transfixed audiences and directly influenced every formally adventurous comedy that came after him — SNL, Monty Python, MST3K, The Daily Show. This Fantagraphics retrospective, curated by his wife Edie Adams's son and the Kovacs archivist, collects never-before-seen photographs, hand-notated scripts, magazine columns, drawings, and excerpts from his comic novel — the primary source document for understanding what it looks like when someone decides a new medium has unexplored formal possibilities and proceeds to explore all of them at once. Note: some of Kovacs's sketch characters reflected the racist and homophobic conventions of 1950s television comedy; the book presents this material in historical context. The formal innovation is the reason he's on this shelf — the understanding that the medium itself is the argument.