Hey, Look! by Harvey Kurtzman (No. 63)

Hey, Look! (1946-1949)

by Harvey Kurtzman

REVIEW BY ERIC REYNOLDS:

(from The 100 Best Comics of the Century! in The Comics Journal #210, 1999)

MAD may be Harvey Kurtzman's lasting legacy when it comes to defining his artistic genius and contribution to American pop culture, but the one-page Hey, Look! strips that Harvey Kurtzman created in the late-1940s are perhaps the purest record of Kurtzman's talent as a cartoonist. The 150 or so strips play to the strengths of the medium so effortlessly and economically that they are, at least in terms of the craft of doing comics, better evidence to Kurtzman's talents than MAD. MAD is certainly the reason that Kurtzman is remembered as one of the four defining classic American comic book cartoonists (along with Barks, Eisner and Kirby), but the Hey, Look! strips are amongst the purest expressions of cartooning ever put to paper.

Aside from a handful of EC stories, Hey, Look! represents some of the last comics that Kurtzman not only created and executed entirely on his own, but that showed such a dedication to every step of the cartooning process. Each is a one-page lesson in the language of comics: storytelling, timing, control, pacing, page design, panel composition, movement, light and shade... it's all there.

Inside each simple illustrated page is a complex and sophisticated design of panels that tell the essentially simple "joke" of the script with as much humour as is possible. These (usually) nine-panel gags that were intended as filler for Timely monster and romance comics could only be the creation of someone who had honed his craft so finely as to compliment and give life to the intangible instinct and inspiration flowing from his mind. 

For me, what makes Hey, Look! hold up so well against the more mature work he later created is the unabashed devotion to craft that the pages display. I miss the Toth-like dedication to black-and-white contrast in later Kurtzman solo projects like The Jungle Book. What the Hey, Look! strips lack in the visceral and naturalistic penwork of The Jungle Book they more than make up for in dripping blacks that proudly display Kurtzman's mastery of the brush. (Kurtzman's ego perhaps never loomed larger than in these strips.) He never again embraced the process of "inking" quite so romantically as then, preferring to collaborate with other master craftsmen like Bill Elder or stick to the simpler, more expressive style of The Jungle Book.

FURTHER READING:
Harvey Kurtzman at The Dennis Kitchen Art Agency
Harvey Kurtzman at Fantagraphics Books
The Harvey Awards