Alan Moore: Memories of Harvey Kurtzman (1924-1993)

The Bedside Mad (1959)

by Harvey Kurtzman & Others

ALAN MOORE:

(from The Comics Journal #157, March 1993)

The first time I encountered Harvey Kurtzman, I was around 10 years old. The encounter took place between the covers of The Bedside MAD, a paperback collection; strange, American, the cover painting possibly by Kelly Freas, the edges of the pages dyed a bright, almost fluorescent yellow. To this day, it burns inside my head. 

The stories in that volume and the Kurtzman stories I discovered later brandished satire like a monkey-wrench: a wrench to throw amongst pop culture's gears or else employed to wrench all our perceptions just a quarter-twist towards the left, no icon left unturned. King Kong and Tarzan, Sherlock Holmes and Superman were rendered naked and absurd by the device of draping them with realistic failings and then setting them against a gross yet realistic world where Wonder Woman marries her romantic interest and ends up shackled to a stove, hemmed in by hyperactive kids. Where all the slapstick violence Maggie dishes out to Jiggs results in ugly bruises, blood-stained collars and the bleak depressions of a battered spouse.

The first time I met Harvey Kurtzman, it was in peculiar and somewhat inauspicious circumstances, over a hotel breakfast in San Diego. Julie Schwartz, aware of my admiration for Harvey's work, had decided to drag me over to the table that Kurtzman was sharing with Jack Davis and make introductions, which effectively made me feel like an awkward, party-crashing nerd from the very outset. Added to this, Harvey was still apparently nursing some obscure minor grievance of possibly pre-war origins against Schwartz, which he vented by pretending to mistake Julie for Robert Kanigher. Brief and largely bewildered introductions were made, and I returned to my orange juice and eggs.

The next time I met Harvey, it was halfway through what was, for personal reasons, probably the lousiest week of my life to date. As a confirmed stick-at-home, I was in France. As a certified convention-hater, I found myself attending the Grenoble comic convention. Beyond this, I was in the middle of a complex and painful relationship-breakdown and I felt wretched, a bone-marrow misery that went on for months.

It's strange, then that this singularly lousy week should also contain a few of the most golden and idyllic hours that I can ever remember spending. Halfway up a mountain, in blazing sunlight above the snowlike, I sat at a cafe table with Harvey Kurtzman, drinking beer while Harvey, suffering from the debilitating effects of Parkinson's disease and bundled up warm on an already warm day, drank cocoa. We both had our families with us, and Harvey's daughter took my daughter's up for a trip in a light aeroplane while we talked with Harvey and his wife Adele.

I don't remember every word we said. I wish I did. I remember that he said Watchmen was "a damn fine piece o' work," and I know that it's one of those memories that I'll still be clutching at pathetically when I'm old and spent. I remember that he seemed surprised when I told him that Watchmen wouldn't exist if he hadn't skewed my perception of the super-hero genre with works like Superduperman. He looked amazed, almost bashful, unbelievably enough, and he said, "Well, how about that?" We talked, unsurprisingly, about comics. I told him about working for DC, how you know they're going to end up owning your creations going in the door, but how at the time you assume, with the total folly of youth, that it isn't important; that you will always have an inexhaustible supply of good ideas. He nodded. "That's true. What you said about assuming that you'll always have ideas, that's very true." Adele asked if he'd like another cocoa. He said, "No, I'd better not. I might start something." I remember all these things, small and useless as they are.

The last time I saw Harvey Kurtzman was the next morning. He and his family were leaving the hotel, taking an early flight back to the States. I hadn't slept, and had come down to the lobby in search of fresh cigarettes only to find Adele, anxious because their taxi had arrived and Harvey was missing.

I found him on the first floor, unable to get his baggage into the elevator due to the ravages of Parkinson's. I helped him get everything downstairs to the taxi, and he was painfully grateful. Bearing in mind that every good idea I ever had was probably ripped off of Harvey Kurtzman, I told him to forget it. That it was a small thing. A brilliant, vital mind trapped in a body that no longer responded properly, he replied that I was wrong. That it was a goddamn big thing. He got in the cab. They drove away towards the airport.

Harvey Kurtzman, the one I last saw that morning is gone. The Harvey Kurtzman who exists in my mind, in my work, in every line I write, he's not gone at all. He's there forever.

 

Harvey Kurtzman (1924-1993) was an American cartoonist, writer, editor and pioneer of comics. He is probably best known for creating the trailblazing and revolutionary humor magazine MAD in 1952 before eventually leaving the publication in 1956. However, his influence extends far beyond that legendary 28 issue run, with his work continuing to inspire generations of cartoonists worldwide. Following his work on MAD, Kurtzman would go on to create a variety of seminal works of the medium including Trump, Humbug, Little Annie Fannie, The Jungle Book and Help! During this time, he helped to discover and mentor a number of diverse talents including Terry Gilliam, Gloria Steinem, Gilbert Shelton and Robert Crumb. Known for his social satire and pop culture parodies, Kurtzman is looked upon as one of the most influential pioneers of comics whose towering and iconic shadow still looms large today.

Goodman Beaver by Harvey Kurtzman & Will Elder (No. 64)

Goodman Beaver (1962)

by Harvey Kurtzman & Will Elder

REVIEW BY RON EVRY:

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

The common judgement of the team of Kurtzman and Elder among comics fans is that their best work was the satire they created for the early issues of MAD. However, this perception glosses over five tales that stand out as the best satire ever conceived for the comic medium: The Goodman Beaver Stories.

These stories that appeared original in Help! Magazine offered views of modern society that work even better now than they did in 1962. While four of them dealt with subjects that were lampooned earlier in MAD (or could have been), each one tackled deeper issues that reflected the dilemma of modern man.

Goodman Meets S*perm*n explored the fact that a real superhero would give up on humanity after realising that "people are no damgood!" Goodman Goes Playboy features a look at Archie and his gang grown and striving to live the life of modern, hedonistic, swingers, and eagerly willing to sell their souls to get that life. Goodman Meets T*rz*n puts a stamp of harsh modern reality on romantic perceptions of jungle intrigue and adventure, and Goodman, Underwater grapples with the idea of actually altering dull realities to become full of intrigue and adventure. Goodman Gets A Gun is an odd story where Goodman himself tries to live out his fantasies as opposed to just observing others.

All of these stories were pointed as hell, clever and would be hysterically funny even if they were all text. But Elder's artwork is utterly masterful, done by a draftsman at the height of his prowess. Each and every panel contains incredible detail - not just in the inking technique - but in the thousands of little "throwaway" gags he delightfully squirrelled into them. Each can keep a reader occupied for hours. I've been rereading them for 37 years and haven't gotten tired of them yet.

FURTHER READING:

Harvey Kurtzman at Fantagraphics Books

TCJ Article: Harvey Kurtzman - The Man Who Created Man & Revolutionised Humour in America

The Atlantic: The Man Who Changed Humour in America Forever

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

The EC War Comics by Harvey Kurtzman & Others (No. 12)

The EC War Comics (1950-1955)

by Harvey Kurtzman & Others

REVIEW BY R.C. HARVEY:

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

In his war stories for the EC adventure titles Two-Fisted Tales and Frontline Combat, Harvey Kurtzman (1924-1993) raised the art of storytelling in comics to a new level while at the same time investing the stories with a realism that infused them with moral passion. The launch of both books coincided with the beginning of the Korean "police action" in the early 1950s, and Kurtzman seized the opportunity to tell the truth about war. War stories in most comic books at the time championed American servicemen at the expense of the enemy's humanity, proclaimed unequivocally the justice of the United Nation's cause, and glorified battlefield action by making killing, bloodshed and death seem patriotic. This, Kurtzman believed, was a lie. And he set out to erase the lie.

It was this crusade that inspired Kurtzman's legendary passion for research. Only the truth can eradicate a lie, and to tell the truth, one needed to study history and news reports in order to unearth fact and to be able to portray facts accurately. Kurtzman had been impressed with Charles Biro's storytelling in the Lev Gleason crime comic books. "He offered stories based on fact, presented in a hard-edged documentary style, a highly original approach to comics back then," Kurtzman said. He recalled the excitement he felt reading those stories, "the shock" of being brought "nose-to-nose with reality." He set out to do the same thing with his war stories. The realities of the battlefield would destroy the phony, glamorous vision of war.

But Kurtzman's war stories were not anti-war: in deglamourising warfare, he did not oppose the effort in Korea. His stories acknowledged the necessity of the fight - not only in Korea but in wars generally. Against that necessity, Kurtzman balanced recognition of the over-all futility of warfare. His unique achievement was to strike the balance. But in those days - in the wake of the superpatriotism of World War II just concluded, during another war in which veterans of the previous conflict were also fighting and dying - to publish such a balanced view was extraordinarily unprecedented. While Kurtzman's stories recognised the causes of wars and the necessity of fighting them, he dramatised the loss, the profligate waste of human life that characterised war everywhere in every time.

To show these consequences, Kurtzman's stories often focused on the fate of a single individual. One story chronicled in elaborate detail the steps a Korean farmer took in building his house - picking a site, laying the foundations, erecting a framework, making bricks, putting it all together. Then on the day he finishes his work, a bomb falls on the house and in a second destroys the painstaking labour of months. In another story, a dying soldier wonders about the arbitrariness of timing: if he hadn't stopped for a moment to tie his shoe, he would have been 20 feet further down the road and when the bomb hit - he would have been far enough away to survive.

In telling the stories, Kurtzman paced his narrative more dramatically than others did at the time. To focus on a key sequence, for instance, he sometimes deployed a series of almost static visuals, the progression of  the panels building to a conclusion with "voice-over" captions while the camera tracked in for a final close-up, giving the last moment of the sequence emotional intensity. This restrained kind of manoeuvre gave his stories the even-handed patina of a documentary, enhancing their realistic aura. A stickler for execution, Kurtzman painstakingly laid out every page of his stories, penciling in the action and the verbiage; and he demanded that the illustrators follow his layouts exactly.

REVIEW BY FRANK MILLER:

(from an interview in The Comics Journal #101, 1985)

EC does represent the most consistently well-crafted line of comics to date. The cartoonists working for EC - Wood, Davis, Severin and Johnny Craig, who deserves to be acknowledged as one of the true greats of the field - consistently produced the finest work of their careers. Craig's and Harvey Kurtzman's work, in particular, are examples of superior talent and dedication to craft. Anyone who hasn't purchased the Cochran reprints, particularly of Craig's crime comics and Kurtzman's war books, is missing out on thrilling work.

FURTHER READING:

Harvey Kurtzman at Fantagraphics Books

TCJ Review: The Anti-War Comics of Harvey Kurtzman by Bob Levin

Ode To Harvey Kurtzman by Robert Crumb

Ode to Harvey Kurtzman 

(Harvey Kurtzman’s Strange Adventures, 1990)

by Robert Crumb

MAD #1-24 edited by Harvey Kurtzman (No. 8)

MAD #1-24 (1952-1956)

edited by Harvey Kurtzman, with Wally Wood, Bill Elder, Jack Davis and others

REVIEW BY DARCY SULLIVAN:

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

Despite their very name, comics have contributed very little to America's comic legacy. Comic strips have introduced many of the most famous persona of American humour, from Charlie Brown to Zippy to Ziggy. But strip away the obscurities (including all alternative comics), the borrowings from other media and the juvenilia, and only one comic book emerges as a true influence on the country's comic consciousness: MAD.

MAD has been an American institution for more than 40 years. Even kids who skipped the Superman and Spider-Man phase snuck MAD to school, memorised the zany names given to characters from films (even films they'd never seen), compete to see who could most adeptly manipulate the back cover fold-in.

The MAD honoured here, however, prospered for just four years, from the comic's birth in 1952 until 1956, when its father, Harvey Kurtzman, left its publisher, William Gaines' EC Comics, in one of the classic creator's rights disputes in comics history. (Shades of Image: Kurtzman not only left MAD, he took his top artists with him and started his own humour magazines.)

Kurtzman possessed a fluid, rhythmic drawing style suited to physical humour. He was also a detail obsessed writer, who had rewritten the rule book on war comics on EC's Two-Fisted Tales and Frontline Combat. As Kurtzman saw it, he was a seeker of Truth.

Of course, a few bucks wouldn't hurt. Kurtzman wanted a book he could crank out faster than his heavily researched war comics. He proposed a humour magazine to Gaines. In its first incarnation MAD was a comic book about comic books (postmodernist alert!) - largely poking fun at the kinds of comics that kept EC afloat.

MAD quickly ran out of comic books to lampoon and began taking on other media, particularly film and advertising. And in a stroke that still seems revolutionary, Kurtzman persuaded Gaines to publish MAD in magazine format - thus sidestepping the then raging furor over comic books and giving Kurtzman the "status" book he sought (he'd been wooed by a major magazine of the day, Pageant).

Notoriously strict about artists following his breakdowns, Kurtzman is clearly MAD auteur. But the artists who drew it - especially Wally Wood, Bill Elder and Jack Davis - rose to the occasion, introducing a new freneticism to comic art. They squirted panels full of sight gags and non sequiturs, creating a dense style described as "chicken fat". That manic energy, along with Kurtzman's rapid-fire verbal riffing, made MAD's pages absolutely electric and immediate.

Critics have praised MAD so fulsomely that the magazines true historical impact has been distorted. Neither Kurtzman or MAD created American satire - but they did bring it to a younger audience. Kurtzman and company used humour as a crowbar to pry apart what things were and what they pretended to be. "Just as there was a treatment of reality in the war books," Kurtzman wrote in his comics history From Aargh! to Zap!, "there was a treatment of reality running through MAD; the satirist/parodist tries not just to entertain his audience but to remind it of what the real world is like."

Ultimately, though, Kurtzman and MAD's subsequent writers were part-time satirists and full-time funnymen. Like children, they would make fun of anything - left or right, young or old, good or bad - simply because it was there. Gaines would later argue that MAD had no morality, no statement beyond "Watch out - everybody is trying to screw you!" Satire was important to MAD, but its real metier was iconoclasm. It was a pie chucked at the nearest face visible.

And like the pie in the face, it was both anarchic and quaintly traditional. Kurtzman brought the Jewish inflections of Catskills comedy to comic books - what are MAD coinages like "potrzebie" and "veedlefetzer" if not put-on Yiddish? Kurtzman's joke constructions drew frequently and expertly from vaudeville comics. The balance between deconstructive cliche-busting and well-structured routines, between Swiftian wit and pure spitball silliness, helps account for Mad's sustained and wide-ranging popularity. For all its buzzing surface quality and apparent rudeness, MAD wasn't nasty - it had charm.

MAD's historical importance grew in the 1960s and 1970s, when it offered the pre-protest set their own connect-the-dots guide to social criticism. And many of MAD's most famous conventions - the movie parodies with Mort Drucker's deadly caricatures, the gonzo visual slapstick of Don Martin, the witty wordless rim-shots by Sergio Aragones and Antonio Prohias - post-date Kurtzman's reign as well. But these and other riches simply wouldn't exist without Kurtzman and his original collaborators, who created MAD's skewed, sarcastic, staccato style. Godfather of the undergrounds, influencer of modern film humour, infiltrator of virtually all media, Kurtzman's little "quickie book" stands not just as one of the greatest comic books ever, but as a true cultural phenomenon.

REVIEW BY ALAN MOORE:

(from a tribute to Harvey Kurtzman in The Comics Journal #157, 1993)

The first time I encountered Harvey Kurtzman, I was around ten years old. The encounter took place between the covers of The Bedside MAD, a paperback collection; strange, American, the cover painting possibly by Kelly Freas, the edges of the pages dyed a bright, almost fluorescent yellow. To this day, it burns inside my head. The stories in that volume and the Kurtzman stories I discovered later brandished satire like a monkey-wrench: a wrench to throw against pop-culture's gears or else employed to wrench our perceptions just a quarter-twist towards the left, no icon left unturned. 

REVIEW BY DAN CLOWES:
Had he not existed, I'd be a dull, humorless lout working in a muffler shop somewhere, and so would practically everyone I know. I shudder to think how horrible the world would be today without that which Harvey Kurtzman begat!

REVIEW BY BILL GRIFFITH (ZIPPY THE PINHEAD)
MAD was a life raft in a place like Levittown, where all around you were the things that MAD was skewering and making fun of. MAD wasn't just a magazine to me. It was more like a way to escape. Like a sign, This Way Out. That had a tremendous effect on me.

FURTHER READING:

Harvey Kurtzman at Fantagraphics Books

TCJ: The Man Who Created MAD & Revolutionised Humour in America

The Atlantic: The Man Who Changed Humour In America Forever

Harvey Kurtzman's Jungle Book by Harvey Kurtzman (No. 26)

Harvey Kurtzman's Jungle Book (1959)

by Harvey Kurtzman 

REVIEW BY KIM THOMPSON:

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

In the four decades between 1952, when he drew his last Frontline Combat story, and his death in 1993, Harvey Kurtzman produced only one substantial narrative piece of work as an illustrator: Harvey Kurtzman's Jungle Book.

Coming off the cancellation of the Playboy-backed Trump and subsequent failure of the self-published Humbug, Kurtzman picked up his drawing tools again at the request of publisher Ian Ballantine, who hoped to duplicate the success of the Mad paperbacks with original paperback cartoon books.

Kurtzman's concept was a quatrain of extended satirical strips: "Thelonius Violence", a Peter Gunn parody narrated in bebop jive, complete with musical soundtrack effects; "Organisation Man in the Grey Flannel Executive Suite", a sardonic look at the corporate world, in which Kurtzman got in his digs at the magazine industry; "Compulsion on the Range", a witty fusion of in-vogue Freudian pop psychology into the TV series Gunsmoke; and "Decadence Degenerated", a funny but deeply serious story of a small-town lynching, build around Kurtzman'z own appalled recollections of a stay in the Deep South.

At 140 brilliant pages, the Jungle Book is certainly Kurtzman's most substantial graphic achievement. The vigour and immediacy of the brushwork, the bold use of tones, the hypnotic pattern of sustained and broken visual rhythms from panel to panel and page to page, make it one of the most formally inventive comic books ever published. And Kurtzman's mordant wit, freed from the constraints of shorter magazine pieces, would never again display as pitiless a bite.

That last Frontline Combat story, a meditation on fate, was called "The Big If". Harvey Kurtzman's Jungle Book provides the biggest "if" in comics history: What if it had been a success? What if Kurtzman instead of being forced to leapfrog from more failed anthologies to the compromised Little Annie Fanny to teaching and illustration jobs, had been able to recreate himself as a one-man satirical storyteller - writing and drawing for magazines and books? What if he had succeeded in caving a niche in the mainstream publishing world, into which the whole next generation of cartoonists could have poured - short story writers, essayists, and novelists who just happened to work in the comics form?

Harvey Kurtzman's Jungle Book remains one of the art form's most stunning successes, and one of the fields most heartbreaking failures.

REVIEW BY ART SPIEGELMAN:

Like most of the other copies of Jungle Book I’ve seen, mine is like a murkily printed newsprint portfolio. The glue binding is just a memory. I keep all the loose yellowed pages in a plastic bag. I’ve handled these pages with all the care due a sacred text, but it just won’t hold up under many more re-readings...  Nowhere else is there such a large body of Kurtzman’s drawings, and Jungle Book was an important step toward making comics Adult Entertainment.

REVIEW BY ROBERT CRUMB:
He is as good as any cartoonist in history that I know of. Some of his greatest stuff was done in a little Ballantine Book called Harvey Kurtzman's Jungle Book published around 1959. Kurtzman did all the drawing as well as the writing. I hope somebody will reprint it someday in its entirety on good paper, as I'd like to own a copy.

FURTHER READING:

Harvey Kurtzman at Fantagraphics Books

The Man Who Changed Humour in America Forever 
The Harvey Awards