The following review would have appeared in ACE Magazine # 4 but that issue will not be appearing now. Thanks to Jon Cooke for allowing me to post it here.
In 1952’s Two-Fisted
Tales # 28, Harvey Kurtzman, like other EC greats, got his single page
“Artist of the Issue” biography. Actually, with his photo and ads for other
titles down the side, it was more like half of one page. How influential has
Harvey Kurtzman been in the 63 years since? Well, let’s just say that Bill
Schelly’s recent hardcover biography from Fantagraphics clocks in at some 642
pages if one counts the extensive footnotes and index! !
In the late 1960s, Harvey Kurtzman was kept busy working on
the world’s most expensive—and first fully painted—comic strip, Little Annie Fanny in Playboy. But I was 10 years old and my
Dad didn’t even read Playboy.
Well...not in the house anyway. Me? I read comic books. I was already a veteran
comic book collector, in fact. Sometimes I even surreptitiously glanced at a
copy of Mad, although I always felt
guilty since it looked like a grown-up mag.
Then, one day, my mother and I were shopping at Woolworth
and I spotted a copy of The Mad Reader
on the store’s paperback racks. While Mom browsed through dime store bric-a-brac,
I started flipping through the furshlugginer book and—even though I didn’t yet
realize it—had my first introduction to the one and only Harvey Kurtzman.
In case you’re one of those folks that somehow hasn’t heard
of Kurtzman and is therefore wondering why he deserves a telephone book size
biography (Do they still make telephone books?) let me give you a quick little
info dump. Harvey created hilarious filler comedy for early Marvel—then
Timely—Comics. He drew some Golden Age superheroes but developed a unique art
style on classic EC war comic books, which he also edited. From there, he created
Mad in both its comic book and
magazine forms. Similarly, he later brought about Trump, Humbug and Help! The latter brought such diverse
names as Gloria Steinem, Robert Crumb, Terry Gilliam, John Cleese and Gilbert
Shelton into the mainstream. Harvey wrote the screenplay for the Rankin-Bass
sixties comedy, Mad Monster Party. His Little Annie Fanny in Playboy
served as a major component of the sexual development for baby boomer boys of
the sixties. He became a mentor as well as an actual teacher for many
underground and overground cartoonists and, in his final years, came out with a
number of new and innovative comics-related projects.
I’m on record as saying that Kurtzman was modestly and passive-aggressively
one of the single most influential people of the 20th Century. From
its title alone—Harvey Kurtzman-The Man
Who Created Mad and Revolutionized Humor in America, it becomes immediately
obvious that author Schelly is on board with that.
To say that Kurtzman was overdue for a full-length biography
is, of course, an understatement. No one questions that he was one of the few
true geniuses of the comics field, the Orson Welles of comics, if you will.
But, like Welles, Harvey was destined to have more brilliant ideas than
brilliant projects. If Mad was Kurtzman’s
Citizen Kane and Help! his Touch of Evil than
Little Annie Fanny might represent Orson’s
long radio career—showy and successful but somehow never quite seeming to live
up to the artist’s full potential.
Make no mistake, though, while this volume rightly lionizes
Harvey for all of his creations and contributions to culture—pop and
otherwise—we do also get plenty of peeks at the man behind the curtain, an
insecure but egotistical control freak with just as many—if not more—personal
issues as the rest of us have.
Bill Schelly has obsessively and impressively pulled
together information from both previously published sources and new research conducted
amongst family, friends and former students. To be honest, other than some late
in life health info, I didn’t come across any big, previously unsuspected
revelations out of all his hard work but that’s completely okay. I’m glad to
have Kurtzman’s story now conveniently located all in one place.
Schelly’s book follows a standard memoir format and does quite
a good job of drawing the reader into the very different type of world where
Harvey was born. These early segments are my favorite parts, really
illuminating the world as it was then. We follow the young Kurtzman through his
learning that he liked to draw at a very early age and on into family troubles,
military service, marriage and art school.
It’s at the latter where our hero meets several fellow
craftsmen who would become allies in later life, not the least being his best
friend, Harry Chester, and his best collaborator, Will Elder. Al Jaffee was
there, then, too, although the two wouldn’t become close until later.
What follows is the true meat of the book as both Kurtzman’s
creativity and autonomy slowly flower when he enters the burgeoning comic book
industry. After some false starts and time at Timely, he ends up at
Entertaining Comics where he doesn’t like Bill Gaines’ horror or science
fiction comics but draws them to pay the bills and stay in the industry he
loved so much by that time.
Proposing a new type of adventure comic book called Two-Fisted Tales, Harvey impresses
Gaines and the outbreak of the Korean Conflict sends sales on the book flying
enough to merit a companion title, Frontline
Combat. Kurtzman becomes so immersed in historical research that he hires
Jerry DeFuccio as an assistant.
And then came Mad.
To me, the absolute highlight of the entire book is the detailed history of the
creation of those early issues of Mad
comics and Mad magazine. Since the
book itself opens and closes with double page Mad endpapers (both by Wally Wood) I think Schelly and/or
Fantagraphics knew that would be the case. The Mad section is of particular interest to me as I wrote my own look
at the Mad comic from an entirely
different perspective for an upcoming 2016 Fantagraphics book on Wood. Looking
back at my own piece, I prefer Schelly’s version.
From there we go on to detail the always fascinating but
rarely fully realized or successful projects created by Harvey, his rediscovery
first by the Underground artists, then the growing EC fandom. We also get a
look at how much influence Mad and,
in particular, Kurtzman began to have on later generations.
Through it all, Harvey Kurtzman seems to have somehow pulled
off an odd and rare combination of self-deprecation and enormous ego. The
narrative details not just his accomplishments and failures but also his
sometimes philosophical thoughts on same. Often, these are offered up by Harvey
himself. One of the benefits of his decades of fame is that he was interviewed
a lot—a LOT! Bill has cherry-picked pertinent quotes from these many interviews
throughout, which gives the reader almost the feeling that Harvey’s ghost is
sitting right beside them, wryly commenting on his own life story as the rest
of us wind our way through it.
But make no mistake. Harvey Kurtzman may be its subject but
the book is Bill Schelly’s and based on the results here, I can think of no
better person to have compiled and told this most remarkable, sad, frustrating,
but ultimately upbeat and important tale. So much of the world we live in today
has been influenced—knowingly or unknowingly—by Harvey Kurtzman. Now, finally, thanks
to Bill Schelly, Fantagraphics, and Harvey
Kurtzman-The Man Who Created Mad and Revolutionized Humor in America, a lot
more people are going to be able to learn that.
Hoo-Hah, indeed!
Booksteve Recommends!
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