Quotes of the Day

What, I wonder, is the cut-off age for acquiring culture heroes — the people who built the foundation for our outlook on life, who influenced our codes of ethics and taste, our senses of style and humor — the names and works we tote in our interior library as treasures that can never be devalued? My guess is the mid-teens. After that, newly-met cultural giants are mostly additions to the landscape. Just as no song can register that poignant pang like one you heard on a car radio in sophomore year, the carving of culture idols is a youngster’s votive vocation.

Anyhow, it was that way with me. By my mid-teens, I’d assembled a gallery of greats that I still think is impressive: in literature, Nabokov and Orwell and Oscar Wilde; in music Pete Seeger, Jerry Lee Lewis, Leiber and Stoller, Comden and Green, Little Richard; in movies Ingmar Bergman, Billy Wilder and Audrey Hepburn; in TV Sid Caesar and Ernie Kovacs; in poetry Allen Ginsberg; in standup comedy Lenny Bruce; in comics Harvey Kurtzman.

Kurtzman — the founding editor of MAD, and later of the humor magazines Trump, Humbug and HELP! — was first in my heart.

Oh, MAD? Yeah: kid stuff. No. Kurtzman’s MAD was, to quote comics historian John Benson in a 1992 essay, “the original early-1950s four-color ten-cent comic book written for adults, not the black-and-white magazine for children edited by others for the last 30-plus years.” Kurtzman had written (virtually alone) and supervised the first 28 issues, 23 as a comic book, five of the magazine version. He then founded and edited three other humor mags — Trump, Humbug and Help! — every issue of which I bought and consumed with relish. (I had a strange diet as a child.)

HARVEY WHO?

One man’s saint is another’s man cipher; and across the vastness of the internet, I hear you shrug, “Harvey Who?” In 1993, when Kurtzman died at 68 (on February 21st), the media shrugged with you. Press people probably knew that MAD had welded a permanent smirk on the face of American youth. But Kurtzman had left MAD in 1956, when it was still a precocious kid, barely four years old; then Al Feldstein took over, nursing the magazine to its eminence as the font of comfortable satire. And in his after-MAD, what did Kurtzman create? “A series of failed humor magazines,” as several obit writers put it. News of Kurtzman’s death was tucked away, like a furtive visual gag in the corner of a one of MAD’s Brueghelesque cartoon panels.

Here is his death notice, reprinted in full, as it ran in the March 2, 1993 TIME: “DIED. Harvey Kurtzman, 68, cartoonist and editor; of complications from liver cancer; in Mount Vernon, New York. Kurtzman was the founding editor and artistic soul of Mad magazine, the satirical comic book that debuted in 1952 and became a pop-culture icon by mocking pop culture.” Forty-three words! This happens to be exactly the verbiage TIME lavished on Barbara Stanwyck when she died two years earlier. Which is to say, we deemed America’s most influential satirist every bit as important as America’s smartest actress.

Some magazines thought the event had a greater cultural relevance. The New Yorker commissioned a commemorative cartoon by Kurtzman’s forty-year co-conspirator Will Elder and ran a perceptive elegy by Adam Gopnik, which said in part: “Kurtzman’s MAD was the first comic enterprise that got its effects almost entirely from parodying other kinds of popular entertainment.... To say that this became an influential manner in American comedy is to understate the case. Almost all American satire today follows a formula that Harvey Kurtzman thought up.”

Nine months before Kurtzman’s demise, MAD’s publisher, William M. (Bill) Gaines, died; and TIME lavishly celebrated his contribution to undermining pop culture. In the June 15, 1992 issue, Kurt Andersen wrote a lovely tribute to “Gaines’ splendidly zany magazine.” (At 860 words, it was exactly 20 times as long as the Kurtzman notice that would follow it.) Of course, Kurt should’ve been writing about Kurtzman. Although Gaines published MAD, and greatly profited from it, he was no more its creator than Time Warner boss Dick Parsons created the “Matrix” movies, or “The Sopranos,” or this article. Kurtzman was MAD’s creative force, and Feldstein, the editor from 1956 to 1984, its sustaining force.

As we noted in our last column, Gaines, the boss of EC comics, had a lot to do with the creation, writing and promotion of his company’s horror and science fiction titles. But was not MAD’s author, only its abettor. He did a crucial thing in 1952: he allowed MAD to happen.

HARVEY COMICS

“Harvey looks like a beagle who is too polite to mention that someone is standing on his tail,” wrote his friend, the humorist Roger Price (“Droodles,” “Mad Libs”). “This beagleishness has certain compensations — he is never ordered off the grass in Central Park and pretty girls stop on the street to scratch him behind the ears.” In later years, when he lost weight, his face took on a genial, Mandarin aspect, with skin drawn like vellum over high cheekbones. He could have been the more cheerful sibling of Austrian character actor Reggie Nalder, the assassin in Hitchcock’s 1956 “The Man Who Knew Too Much.”

From childhood, Harvey knew what he wanted. Born October 3, 1924, in a section of Brooklyn still rural enough to allow the occasional goat to wander through it, the lad drew his first daily comic strip in chalk on the neighborhood streets: “Ikey and Mikey,” a four-panel cartoon that would be washed away by rain or sanitation-truck spray each morning. He showed enough promise that he was sent to the High School of Music and Art in Manhattan, the launching strip for many future EC-dizzyasts, including Feldstein, artists Jack Kamen and John Severin, business manager Harry Chester and Harvey’s enduring friend and collaborator Wolf Eisenberg — later Bill (later Will) Elder. Elder’s cartoon elegy in The New Yorker shows the young Kurtzman being kicked out of Music and Art and given the shouted advice, “Take up music!”

But Harvey was bound to make cartooning into art. At 14 he won a drawing contest in Tip Top Comics. He found ways to compress humor into a single panel. In his charming autobiography, “My Life as a Cartoonist,” written with Howard Zimmerman and intended for kids, he describes one of these tableaux: “a picture of a guy on the ledge of a tall building. He’s getting ready to commit suicide by jumping off. A cop is running across the rooftop toward the guy, waving his gun and yelling, ‘Stop, or I’ll shoot!’ ... It didn’t get a laugh from anyone but me.” Well, it makes me laugh. And in the 50s, a smart substratum of American youth would get infected with Kurtzmania.

Drafted in World War II, he was assigned to the U.S. Army Department of Information and Education, where he drew cartoons that appeared in the Army weekly Yank, and learned enough about weapons and the men who fire them to write a book — or, to be exact, two great comic books. (Stay tuned.) After the war he worked for the predecessor to Marvel, Timely comics, where he met his one and only wife Adele, and where the young Stan Lee commissioned him to draw a one-page occasional feature called “Hey Look.”

Kurtzman’s playful disregard of the dimensions of the traditional comic-strip format is already evident in “Hey Look” (some of which were reprinted in MAD #7 and #8, and which in 1991 were collected in book form). Example: a guy finds a crayon pencil and leans into the next panel to draw another guy ... who finds a piece of chalk who draws a third guy ... who finds a brush filled with paint and draws a fourth guy, who says, “There’s a finger-paint set right outside the page, and I don’t think we’ll be able to reach it.” Also in the late 40s, Kurtzman did another strip, a Western spoof called “Pot-shot Pete” (which also moseyed into MAD, issues #15 and #18).

He got to EC in 1949, when the company had yet to find its direction. His first job was illustrating a pamphlet on the dangers of syphilis; it has a Western motif and was called “Lucky Fights It Through: The Story of That Ignorant, Ignorant Cowboy.” But Gaines was about to go New Trend, and Kurtzman was persuaded to help: he illustrated a story in the very first issues of four of the new titles. Gaines, obviously a man who made smart decisions quickly, must have sensed the new guy’s imagination, for from then on, 15 times over the next year, Kurtzman scripted the stories he drew.

KURTZMAN AT WAR

Late in 1950, Gaines gave Kurtzman his own comic book, Two-Fisted Tales (now available in invaluable reprints from Russ Cochran, at 1-800-322-7978, or from Bud Plant). When he got the assignment Kurtzman was just 25 (in 1951 virtually everyone at EC, including Gaines, was under 30) and ready to show he could do it — do it all. From the second through the 14th issues, Kurtzman wrote and storyboarded every tale, and drew all but one of the covers. Eight months later, when TFT had proved modestly successful, Kurtzman got the OK to create another war comic, Frontline Combat. For the first 12 issues, he wrote and designed every story, and did the covers. He continued with both magazines through late 1953, when he concentrated on turning MAD into a monthly.

TFT began as an action-adventure mag (subtitled “He-Man Adventure”), but as Korean War anxieties swelled in the American body politic, it became a war comic (“War and Fighting Men”). We could say an anti-war comic, for it often focused on the average grunt. In TFT, war was hell, if Hell can be defined as a place where random violence exploded in your face, where a man’s luck never lasted for long. There’s a difference, though. In Hell, no one can die. GIs often died in Kurtzman’s war tales, and civilians too: a Korean man meticulously constructing a home for his family in “Rubble!” (TFT #24), nearly all the members of a Japanese soldier’s Nagasaki family in “Atom Bomb!” (TFT #33).

In a Kurtzman war story, everyone was, potentially, collateral damage. Death has finality, but no meaning. His famous parable “Big ‘If’!” (Frontline Combat #5, reprinted in “From Aargh! to Zap!: Harvey Kurtzman's Visual History of the Comics”) is a soldier’s meditation on the implacability of the laws of chance. “‘If’! Not much of a word! A little word! But lots of meaning,” he muses. “If only that shell splinter had gone five more inches to the right... or if Paul Maynard’s heart had only been five more inches to the left... or if Paul Maynard hadn’t even been born! If... if... if...” The soldier sobs himself to sleep. To death — for the seven-page monologue is the split-second flash, an “Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge” epiphany, in which Paul Maynard understands mortality before he that shell splinter ends his life.

“Kurtzman’s naturalistic conviction [was] brought out by the absurdity of the war milieu,” writes Thomas Durwood in a superb essay in Crimmer’s: The Journal of the Narrative Arts (Spring 1976). “An American and a Korean, isolated from the war in a foxhole, exchange snapshots and then, when the battle reaches them, kill each other.... American soldiers are frightened and ashamed to kill, dialogue is interrupted when the speaker is shot and killed. Kurtzman is tied neither to an ideal of heroism not to a perspective of taking sides.... These people exist, these things happen. The only element Kurtzman adds to shape the events is drama, which serves to tease out the absurdity skulking just below the romantic surface. The face of death itself is faced with no embellishment, no symbolization into monsters or abstractions into spirituality: a random bullet in the face, the knife of an enemy soldier.”

He was a maniac for authenticity; he had to be able to convey how every bullet felt, how every weapon was made, how every blast assaulted a soldier’s ears. He supplemented memories of his war service with field trips of his own, such as the test flight he took in a Grumman seaplane. In Bhob Stewart’s handsome, comprehensive “Against the Grain: MAD Artist Wallace Wood,” Jerry De Fuccio, Kurtzman’s assistant (and later co-editor of MAD), recalled that “I was given a cast iron model of a Mauser to bring to Wally’s house in Forest Hills [actually Rego Park]. I was on a crowded subway platform; it fell out of the paper bag, and I picked it up very casually.” In Frank Jacobs’ EC history, “The MAD World of William M. Gaines,” De Fuccio says, “Harvey knew the research rooms of the New York Public Library inside out.” Kurtzman sent De Fuccio to the Naval Submarine Base in New London, Conn., to get “the scream of the klaxon, the sound of the diving alarm, the chime of the dinner bell.”

This aural research paid off in the “sound effects” that exploded in the war scenes, or snaked across panels, of Kurtzman’s pages: “GNA GNA GNA GNA” (machine-gun fire), “FROOSHT!” and “ZOOOOOOSH!” (a pair of rockets), “MMRROWW” (an air raid siren), “WEEEEEEEEEEEEEE” (the whizzing of an artillery blast) that ends in “BA-DOOM!” (as in doom). In “Rubble” we read — no, we hear — “The North Koreans came to conquer, with pistols [CRAK!], with rifles [POW!], with mortars [WONK!] and with cannons [BLAM!].” As the cinematic choice of perspective in Kurtzman’s storyboards effectively made the stories motion pictures, so the forceful use sound effects made them talkies. Or, at least, noisies.

A FLASH IN THE DAN

“When you’d pick up a story, Harvey would sit down with you and he would read it to you.” This is Jack Davis, 30 years after the fact, in a conversation with Kurtzman and comic-strip dean Will Eisner (reprinted in “Will Eisner’s Shop Talk”). “He acted it out, all the way through — the horses, if there were horses, and everything. When he got through with it, you felt like you’d lived the story.” This acting-out method was standard at EC: Feldstein or Gaines would read their stories aloud to anyone in the office, testing their dramatic potential. But Kurtzman needed more than a first listener. “In doing one of these stories, a lot of research went into it,” he told Eisner, “and I just had to pass that research on. It was some kind of ego thing, I guess. I probably drove everybody crazy with my demands, and I probably still do.”

That was the case throughout his career. Feldstein “scripted” his stories, but let his artists choose the pictorial point of view — the camera angle — for each panel. Kurtzman meticulously storyboarded his work on tissue paper, which he basically wanted the artists to trace over. “When he wrote a story on Army medics,” Jacobs writes, “He procured an official medical kit and told artist Jack Davis to reproduce it faithfully. ‘No, Jack,’ Kurtzman complained when he was brought the artwork, ‘the gauze pad goes to the right of the sulfa!’” (The anecdote is telling, but if Jacobs is referring to “Combat Medic!” in Frontline Combat #4, it’s not true; the piece has no closeup of a medical kit.) Kurtzman’s reputation for minute supervision followed him to the grave. A portion of Elder’s 1993 New Yorker tribute has Kurtzman peering over an artist’s shoulder, saying, “Looks great — do it over!”

But as wearying as working for Harvey must have been, being Harvey was tougher. The job was grinding him down without making him rich. The faster, more facile Feldstein could crank out seven bi-monthly magazines at a time, to Kurtzman’s two, and reap the monetary rewards. Kurtzman was so strapped for cash that, for about a year, beginning in April 1952, he scripted the daily comic strip Flash Gordon, drawn by Dan Barry (with occasional help from Davis and Frank Frazetta). Read the 1951-53 strips today, in a single large volume, and you’ll find a smart, addictive fantasy-adventure with some fine Kurtzman touches.

On the planet Tartarus, Flash and his gang are menaced by The Awful Forest, a grove of illusion that practically crushes Flash with sound effects like “Hooo-Hahaeeiay.” (“Hoo-hah!” was the title of the lead story in the first issue of MAD, which had just been published when this Flash Gordon segment appeared.) The inhabitants of Pasturia, the Utopian land beyond the Forest, have a measuring device called the Badulator — Flash’s sexy companion Marla registers “one thousand ‘erg’s of evil! The top of the scale!” — and a wish-granting machine, the Cornucopiak, which Marla manages to corrupt and nearly destroy. Sometimes Kurtzman’s irony is more direct. He shows Flash and faithful girlfriend Dale Arden embroiled in a lovers’ spat, then makes an aside: “Dear Reader, We will skip the details of an ageless argument...” (next panel) “...that ends in the usual way!” — with Flash succumbing to Dale’s pleas. The hero is henpecked!

While cordial to each other, the writer and the illustrator never agreed on the division of labor. Kurtzman wanted Barry to faithfully render his sketches, as his EC artists had done. Barry figured he was the boss, as indeed he was, and would be for the next 40 years. He retired from the daily strip in 1990; it was canceled three years later.

Kurtzman stopped scripting Flash Gordon in early 1953, but he couldn’t complain about being let go. By then he had another job at EC, writing and editing the company’s first flat-out humor magazine. As the logo had it: “Tales Calculated to Drive You MAD.”

HARVEY’S MAD

MAD made its debut in August 1952, with the Oct.-Nov. issue. It was published bimonthly for nine issues, then monthly from April 1954, by which time it was selling, according to one account, 750,000 copies — more than half-again as many as EC’s top horror titles. MAD’s success had the same effect on originality-deprived competitors as the popularity of the horror-comics line; a couple dozen “humor” titles sprang up within two years of MAD’s debut. One was EC’s in-house ripoff, Panic magazine. The bimonthly Panic ran for 12 issues, from early 1954 to the end of 55; the first six issues were written by Feldstein, the next six by Jack Mendelsohn (who would later work on various TV series and co-write the Beatles’ animated film “Yellow Submarine”).

In a column titled “What, Me Fifty?” I wrote about the MAD comic book, so I’ll fill in just a few blanks here. Each 32-page, four-color issue, like virtually every issue of all other EC publications, ran four illustrated stories, usually of eight, seven, six and seven pages. On Two-Fisted Tales and Frontline Combat, the four stories were typically apportioned among these artists: Davis, Wood, Kurtzman himself and the team of John Severin and Bill Elder (John drew the pictures, Bill inked them). Harvey brought the whole crew over to MAD, while they continued drawing his war comics. The one change Kurtzman made was to split the Severin-Elder tandem so that each man was responsible for one story. This was a promotion for Elder; previously, he had done solo work on only one EC story (for Weird Science in the summer of 1952).

Before MAD, Elder was mad — first subtly, then rampant. Kurtzman’s autobiography notes that the teenage Elder had painted, in his bedroom, a landscape mural that changed foliage with the seasons. At the EC offices he used to set his finger on fire, after dipping it in rubber cement. (For many other anecdotes, and some gorgeous reproductions of this graphic comedian’s best work, buy, do not borrow, Gary Groth and Greg Sadowski’s “Will Elder: The Mad Playboy of Art.”) If Kurtzman and his MAD artists can be compared to another bunch of early-50s comic smarty-pantses, the Sid Caesar writing staff, then Elder was Mel Brooks. Both men were effusive, ideas-a-poppin’ tummlers who pushed their fellow wits to ever dizzier heights. Elder certainly had that effect on Kurtzman, who said Will would “carry my stuff forward and enrich it by a multiple of five.” See especially “Woman Wonder!” in MAD #10, “Starchie” (#12) and the all-time-fabulous “Mickey Rodent!” (#19).

I loved the three main MAD artists. (Severin, whose cubic-jawed heroes were more suitable for action comics, dropped out after issue #10. His sister Marie, who colored many of the EC stories, remained.) Davis’ willowy babes and western varmints, their stench rises from the magazine’s pages, their size 18 shoes giving them a clownish cast, glamorized any number of TV parodies. His work was the cartooniest of the three main artists, the most ostensibly distinctive, and it gave him a long, fruitful career doing covers for TIME (26) and TV Guide. David was always grateful for Kurtzman’s early guidance. “What Harvey did, with MAD and Two-Fisted Tales, was a lot of fun,” he told Eisner. “It was great and I enjoyed it. The horror bit, you know — with all of my stuff — one night we had a big bonfire and I burned all of those comic books. [chuckles]” Now there’s a horror story with an awful ending. Of course, this was before eBay.

Wood, whose lusciously shaded style was influenced by Milton Caniff, and who in 1949 had drawn Eisner’s “The Spirit” strip for three weeks (even famous cartoonists had to take their families on vacation), did many of Kurtzman’s adventure-strip parodies: “Flesh Garden!”, “Bat Boy and Rubin!”, “Prince Violent!” and, crucially, “Superduperman,” the story (in MAD #4) that joyously outed the magazine’s impulse to parody pop culture. Clark Bent, assistant to the copy boy, believes that if only ace reporter (and prime Wood dish) Lois Pain knew he was Superduperman she’d be his love slave instead of his tormentor (“Geddouda here, ya creep!”). Finally he reveals his true identity and she still walks out. Kurtzman’s moral: Once a creep, always a creep.

He and Wood combined on two of MAD’s wittiest stories. “3-Dimensions!” is a spoof of the then-current fad for 3-D comic books; the two outlines, red and blue, of a walking man gradually separate until one of the outlines falls in a manhole while the other keeps strolling. “Sound Effects!”, which tells a complex murder mystery using nothing but grunts, creaks, oofs and the indispensible “Aargh!”, is a comic twist on all the GNAs, WONKs and BA-DOOM!s of his war comics.

Elder, 82, and Davis, 79, are still alive to bathe in the memorial glow of their EC work. Wood, who produced nearly a thousand pages for EC in 1950-55, lost vision in one eye and contracted a kidney disease. Facing the prospect of life on a dialysis machine, Woody said no thanks and put a fatal bullet in his temple in 1981. He was 54.

MAD GOES MAG

The horror-comic witch haunt, described in last week’s column, dented the sales of EC’s top sellers. Gaines, once publisher of 10 titles, now had one: MAD. (He even released Feldstein, who had written and designed seven of those magazines.) Kurtzman, as creator and operator of the company’s only asset, was being romanced by Harris Shevelson, the editor of Pageant magazine, a biweekly Reader’s Digest imitation. Pageant had run a flattering piece on MAD, actually identifying Kurtzman (not Gaines) as the brains behind it, and Shevelson wanted Harvey to be his chief deputy at Pageant. Desperate to keep his only editorial asset, Gaines revived a notion Kurtzman had floated months before: to turn MAD comic into MAD Magazine. Kurtzman agreed — just as well, since Pageant would be kaput in less than a decade. On the inside back cover of issue #23 the great announcement was made. “For the past two years now, MAD has been dulling the senses of the country’s youth. Now we get to work on the adults.”

The full-size, black-and-white, 48-page, 25-cent MAD made its debut with #24, the July 1955 issue. Its cover featured an illustrated frame (by Kurtzman) indicating the subjects to be surveyed inside, including Literature (a crossword puzzle), Drama (the Janus faces, one with 3D glasses), Music (a juke box), Politics (the three “no evil” monkeys), Sport (a pinball machine), Radio (a cobwebbed set with a rat nearby), Television (a man’s foot manacled to a set showing a wrestling match), Business (an executive with a sexy secretary on his lap). In a cameo in the top center was a soon-to-be-familiar face with the legend, “What — me worry?”

Kurtzman first put this laughing-kid face on the cover of Ballantine Books’ “The MAD Reader,” a collection of stories from the comic book. He then appeared as a tiny icon on the cover of MAD #21. Through Kurtzman’s MAD magazine reign the face and the name — Alfred L. or Alfred E. Neuman (art director John Putnam says he changed the initial for euphony — showed up frequently, though not always together. Sometimes he was ID’d as Melvin Cowsnofski. Elder’s “Ed Suvillan” parody (#27) features an apple-cheeked, bespectacled Alfred L. Neuman as a bit player and, on the tag page, a Judge Alfred E. Neuman. Alfred E. appears as a thin man with big teeth in Wood’s “Talk”; as a portly fellow, dead in a tutu, in Elder’s “Radiodetectiveland”; and as a blind pitcher in Davis’ “Baseball: Science or Skill.” By the end of Kurtzman’s year making MAD a magazine, the name, the face and the “What, me worry?” phrase had come together to form the magazine’s corporate logo, which Feldstein would codify as MAD’s cover boy from issue #30 on.

“Bill gave me carte blanche,” Kurtzman recalled in Maris Reidelbach’s “Completely MAD,” an illustrated history of the magazine. “And with my carte blanche, I went out into the world of newsstands and bought a bunch of magazines, because I needed a totally original format. ... [T]here were no guidelines. Make up the guidelines: now there was a great creative moment for me.” Once again, he was looking for models to twist, upend and make funny. With the first issue of MAD comic, Kurtzman had basically parodied the tone and stories of other EC comics. With the first issue of MAD magazine, he filched mainly from Life: stories broken into categories, or “departments,” with panels of drawings above perhaps a half-page of text. The same artists were employed, but with Elder, Wood and Davis parodying magazine photographs instead of enlarging on the visual vocabulary of comic books.

In MAD comic, Kurtzman had occasionally flirted with — no, dated on a semi-regular basis — the magazine format. Social-trend parodies like “Restaurant!” and “Newspapers!” (both MAD #16), “Supermarkets!” (#19), “Cowboy!” (#20), “Slow Motion!” ($21) and “Scenes We’d Like to See!” (#23) gave hints of the magazine approach he envisioned — and which future MAD writer Dave Berg would use in his “Lighter Side of...” series. But these early pieces stories still had characters drawn as vivid caricatures; the narration still ran atop the panel and ended with the usual exclamation marks (to cue the reader’s laugh). All was subtler in the magazine version. Kurtzman was working on the adults, or the kids with a quarter to spend.

Among the funny stuff: Doodles Weaver’s strict copyediting of the Gettysburg Address, advising Lincoln to change “Four score and seven” to eighty-seven (“Be specific”), noting that there are six “dedicates” (“Study your Roget”), wondering “proposition” isn’t misspelled and, finally exasperated, urging the writer to omit “Of the people, by the people, and for the people” as “superfluous.” The parodies were often super-sharp: the movie “whose title brings to mind the man who sat down on a tattoo needle and... HE ROSE TATTOOED”: the comic-strip “Starchie,” in which Bottleneck (Jughead) wears a swastika on his sweater. Best of all were the many fake ads, usually drawn by Elder with a verisimilitude that exposed, on closer look, the fly in the bottle of Chanel No. 5, or the golf ball (instead of an egg) stuck to the Band-Aid, or the whiskey ad with a slogan I later had my pre-school nieces memorize as comic wisdom — “Drink enough Canadian Clubbed and you’ll drink Canada dry.”

SNAILS CALCULATED TO DRIVE GAINES MAD

The new MAD was an instant hit. But EC was still strapped for cash. With the failure of its New Direction and Picto-Fiction lines, and the bankruptcy of his distributor Leader News, Gaines was $110,000 in debt. He was ready to cease publication, but Kurtzman convinced him that would be foolish, with MAD magazine generating big mo (money and momentum). So Gaines and his mother each put up $50,000 to cover the shortfall. Kurtzman, to get more money for his artists, took a pay cut. MAD saved the company.

But where was MAD? Or, rather, when? Fifty-two pages (48 plus the cover and gag ads) of an 8-1/2x11-inch magazine took more time for one man to produce than 30 pages of the 7x10-inch comic book. A lot more time, when the man was Kurtzman. The magazine was aiming for a bimonthly schedule, but the issue dates — June 55, September 55, November 55, Spring 56, Summer 56 (which was promoted as the “Spring Issue”) — show that Kurtzman wasn’t close to meeting his deadlines. He turned out five MAD magazines in a period when eight bimonthly issues should have appeared. That leaves three phantom issues, with phantom income for Gaines.

Another thing: Under the Life format an issue of MAD now contained 15 or more stories instead of the comic-book four. So Kurtzman had to brainstorm four times as many subjects as before. That wouldn’t be a catastrophe for a delegator, but with the exception of short pieces by Ernie Kovacs, Roger Price and a few other comedians, Harvey was still writing and tissue-drawing every piece. Gaines had to sit and simmer while Harvey’s proceeded at the snail’s pace of a perfectionist.

Also, while ostensibly giving Kurtzman’s parodic impulses more breadth — he could lampoon just about anything — the Life-style parodies didn’t provide Kurtzman with the narrative engine the comic-book format did. Each story was a report, essentially a series of gags, rather than a story with its own comic jet propulsion. It allowed him to get inside trends but not, so much, inside characters. Even the movie parodies were typically only two to four pages, and often they were “covered” as Life would — in mock-photo and mock-caption form — rather than by recapitulating and twisting the plot. The wit on display was cooler, drier... I’ll say grayer, befitting the monochrome inside pages that had replaced colorist Marie Severin’s lusciously lurid coating of the artists’ black-and-white originals in the EC comics.

Now, though, MAD was EC. And Kurtzman figured he should be rewarded for years of underpaid brilliance. He had made Gaines a bundle. Moreover, Hugh Hefner, whose Playboy was the other big magazine success story of the 50s, had offered him the chance to start his own full-color magazine. Through his business manager Harry Chester, Kurtzman told Gaines he wanted 51% of the company. Gaines threw him out. Harvey had completed 23 issues of MAD comic, five of MAD magazine. His reign lasted four years. And though he would create some wonderful magazines over the next decade, and would be a mentor and beacon to artists for the rest of his life — Saint Harvey — the Great Moment was over.

Re-enter Feldstein. “I was let go by Bill after his Distributor's bankruptcy,” the old Crypt-maker e-mailed me, “and was on the street for about 3 weeks, doing free-lance scripts and peddling an idea for an Adult Humor Magazine that would be a 'showcase' for Iconoclastic Humorists such as Lenny Bruce, Shelly Berman, Bob and Ray, etc. I was also in negotiations to form an "experimental title" department for a comic book publisher... and was returning from a meeting with them when I was met at the Merrick station of the LIRR by Bill Gaines, who informed me that he had just fired Harvey Kurtzman and then asked me if I'd like to come back to work for him. I agreed (happily, because I hated Free-Lance work!)... and then he cagily asked me what we would do together (knowing damned well that Lyle Stuart had recommended that he re-hire me to do MAD!)...and I answered with the words he wanted to hear: ‘We’ll continue doing MAD! It has great potential!’”

Together, Gaines and Feldstein set about trying to make a regular buck. “[W]hen Kurtzman left here and Al came back and took his place,” Gaines told EC teen historian Fred von Bernewitz in 1957, “one of the first things we decided was that our policy in the past had been very poor, when we were putting quality first and good business practice so completely second that we ended up practically out of business. And one of the things we definitely decided to do was: let’s sell MAD, first. And let’s try to make it a good worthy magazine second. ... The first thing to do is to make profits, cause if you don’t have profits, you’re out of business, just like Trump.”

GETTING TRUMPED

Trump, Humbug, Help! Those are the titles of the three magazines Kurtzman created after MAD, and two of them are muttered exclamations. (Three, if you got fired off “The Apprentice.”) They may have expressed the increasing frustration Kurtzman felt as he tried to sustain and extend his approach to humor without benefit of the MAD brand. Indeed, the cover of Trump proclaimed it “a new magazine which would like to say....mainly HELP!” And, in the Prospectus on page one: “This, then, shall be the purpose of Trump. Making money. You have the money, You give it to us.”

Hefner gave Kurtzman the money for Trump. Elder, Davis, Wood (briefly) and Al Jaffee gave Harvey their loyalty; they left the sure thing of MAD for the iffy proposition of Trump. Chester came along as managing editor, leaving the MAD house virtually untenanted. (More about that later.) So did a flock of Kurtzman fans, including three kids from Philadelphia: Benson, later the EC scholar; Robert Crumb, later the weird cartoonist; and me. There were others who, in perhaps the first act of political idealism in their lives, renounced MAD in protest over its editor’s departure. “When Kurtzman left MAD, it was just a terrible moment,” Terry Gilliam, then a Los Angeles high school student, recalled in an interview for the Elder book. “And I just hated Bill Gaines. Gaines was like a monster, and Feldstein a traitor! I thought this was disgusting and just stopped reading MAD after Harvey left.”

This, of course, was decades before the Internet grapevine instantly told fans of their idols’ activities. Yet somehow kids knew that the old MAD men had a new magazine. Trump sold for 50 cents, five times the cost of MAD two years before. It was lavish, offering in the first issue a panoramic watercolor foldout, painted by Elder and Russ Heath, of a Life-type Epic of Man, updated to the 20th century, and, in the second, a nine-page parody of Sports Illustrated whose cover image, “First head-on photo of a bullet taken without mirrors,” shows the photographer, as reflected in the speeding bullet, screaming and dropping his camera.

And it was good. Some pieces lodged in my funny-brain when I read in 1957 and have stayed there, for reference and refreshment. Elder’s Beck (Breck) shampoo ad for three kinds of hair: Dry, Oily and No. The Ed Fisher cartoon showing a cowboy at an Indian reservation opening a rifle-shaped box marked farming tools and exclaiming, “Great scott! Farming Tools!” Davis’ anti-hunting hunting story. Foremost, the Arnold Roth piece called “Russians Inventions We Invented First”: vodka, borscht, Russian roulette and veto — “a word commonly identified with Russian U.N. delegation, was the accidental creation of Harry Thimk, sign-painter from Bushes, Florida” who tried to paint a VOTE sign but misspelled it. (Note the creepy presentiment in the town and state: In the 2000 Presidential election, the Bushes insured that Florida votes were vetoed.)

GETTING SCROOGED

The failure of Gaines’ magazine distributor had forced a crisis at EC. In 1957, the same thing happened to Hefner’s distributor. Faced with mounting debt, he cut costs at Playboy and, though a fan of Trump, killed Kurtzman’s baby after just two issues. Within a few months, Harvey was ready to start once more, this time bringing Elder, David, Roth and Chester into a consortium for an artist-owned magazine called Humbug. The cover of its premiere issue (August 1957) was in the dire Kurtzman mode: “The end of the world is coming.” And, inside, this declaration of editorial principle: “We won’t write for morons. We won’t do anything just to get laughs. We won’t be dirty. We won’t be grotesque. We won’t be in bad taste. We won’t sell magazines.”

The faithful were buying. It wasn’t always easy to find Humbug (which, in its meager 6-1/2x9-1/2-inch size, often got lost on the magazine rack), let alone to read it (poor-quality stock, and large type for the dialogue balloons that dwarfed the illustrations); but I found, read and enjoyed. Kurtzman and Elder teamed on more excellent movie parodies: “Doll-Baby,” in which repo men remove our heroine’s furniture, boyfriend and comic-strip panel; “Around the Days in 80 Worlds,” featuring 80 (count em) expert celebrity caricatures; and “Jailbreak Rock,” an Elvis send-up that contained the immortal line, “I’m going to give you a ‘Hollywood beating,’ the sound effects of which you will never forget.”

New recruit Larry Siegel (later a MAD stalwart and an Emmy-winning writer for Carol Burnett) did fine lampoons of popular novels — “Something of Mau Mau,” “Marjorie Morningsun,” “Pagan Place.” And Roth did some terrific work, including a two-pager of Baseball Predictions and Travel Posters for world hot spots. He also fed the magazine’s obsession with Teamster boss Dave Beck; Roth gave Beck the Playboy centerspread treatment as Pinup of the Month.

Humbug had an official Neuman-like mascot: Seymour Mednick. The idea was to establish a funny name, like Kurtzman’s old favorite Melvin Cowsnofski, except that Mednick was an actual person — a photographer of artful album covers. That’s where I came in. In a letter in Humbug #9, I declared I was starting a Seymour Mednick Fan Club. Some people responded and, on the mimeograph machine in my father’s office, I cranked out a few issues of the SMFC Bulletin, quite possibly the lamest fanzine ever published. All copies are lost, I’m pleased to report, but the fiasco had a lovely side benefit: I met and befriended Arnold Roth, a fellow Philadelphian who, with what must have been masochistic graciousness, allowed me to phone or visit him, his lovely wife Caroline and their infant son. Arnold also helped warp my fragile little mind by lending me LPs of a new comedian, Lenny Bruce. (I’ll repay that gift in a column next month.)

In a Benson memoir of his youth as a Kurtzmaniac, he wrote about Roth’s kindness to him. (Wait a minute! I was Arnold’s groupie! I felt like the rich man’s mistress who finds out he had another one he loved better.) He was just one of several Kurtzman fans who devoted parts of their careers to EC scholarship. Von Bernewitz, who published the mimeographed Complete EC Checklist in 1955, revised it in later editions, which was eventually expanded into “Tales of Terror!”, the indispensible guide to EC in the 50s. Bhob Stewart, whom von Bernewitz cites as the kid who turned him on to EC, had an acting and writing career (the 1985 cartoon series “Kissyfur”) and edited the gorgeous book on Wally Wood’s art “Against the Grain.” Benson interviewed Gaines and Kurtzman for Russ Cochran’s 1987 publication of the complete MAD comic-book run in a four-volume hardback format; edited the superb, rigorously researched Squa Tront fanzine; and contributed research and insights to “Tales of Terror!”

But a few fans, however rabid and informed, could not sustain a magazine with no fat-cat backers, only the staff cooperative that published it. On the first page of Humbug issue #11, the headline read: Man — We’re Beat! “Satire has got us beat,” Kurtzman wrote. “1953 — We started MAD magazine for a comic-book publisher and we did some pretty good satire and it sold very well. 1956 — We started Trump magazine...and we worked much harder and we did much better satire and we sold much worse. 1957 — We started Humbug magazine and we worked hardest of all and turned out the very best satire of all, which of course now sells the very worst of all.” He cited the magazine’s original declaration (“We won’t sell any magazines”) and added, “Humbug has not let its readers down!” He concluded: “And now ... as they throw rocks at Vice President Nixon ... as space gets cluttered with missiles ... and as our names are carefully removed from our work in MAD pocketbooks — a feeling of beatness creeps through our satirical veins and capillaries and we think how George S. Kaufman once said, ‘Satire is something that closes Saturday night’....”

FROM HELP! TO HEF

Humbug died with that issue, but the editor kept busy: writing and illustrating the four stories in “Harvey Kurtzman’s Jungle Book,” the first original cartoon paperback; composing “The Grasshopper and the Ant,” a 1960 four-pager for Esquire (now available in beautiful book form from Kitchen Sink Press); and working with Elder on stories for Pageant, some of which are reprinted in “The Mad Playboy of Art.” (Could our H.K. have also been the pseudonymous Herman Klopfinger III who in 1960 wrote the text for the Elder-illustrated “Hateful Thoughts for Happy Occasions”? I hope so. It would increase the value of the copy I bought then and still have.)

And then he started another magazine, his last. Help!, published by James (Famous Monsters of Filmland) Warren, was the cheapest of all Kurtzman periodicals. It used, because it could afford, much less artwork from the MAD, Trump and Humbug veterans. Instead, it adapted the Italian fumetti — a series of staged photographs telling a story — and ran gag captions to movie or news photos, along with cartoons from college humor magazines and the burgeoning underground comix. Gilliam and Gloria Steinem were on the staff; Woody Allen and John Cleese were among the lesser-knows who appeared in the fumetti; Crumb, Art Spiegelman, Jay Lynch and Gilbert Shelton got their first national exposure (at $5 a pop) in Help!’s pages. The magazine lasted 26 issues, until the economic shoestring wore out.

From the launching of Two-Fisted Tales (Nov.-Dec. 50) to the folding of Help! (after the Sept. 65 issue), with Frontline Combat MAD and Trump and Humbug and “Jungle Book” in between, only 15 years had elapsed. For the cognoscenti, Kurtzman’s Pantheon status had long been secure. But could he make a living? He could, thanks to Hefner, a cartoonist in his youth. “I always enjoyed the comic-strip version of MAD, the cartoon parodies, more than what came later,” he recalled in the Elder book. Hef thought that Goodman Beaver — a trouble-prone, Candidean naif whom Kurtzman had introduced in “Jungle Book” and spun into five Help! tales illustrated by Elder — could be a continuing character in a Playboy comic feature. He just needed a sex change...into Little Annie Fanny.

Hefner always dreamed big, and often turned those dreams into a kind of reality. “Instead of the flat, fake color used in the Sunday funnies,” he wrote, “we decided that ‘Little Annie Fanny’ should be rendered in full color, just as the commercial artist does for a magazine illustration, and then reproduced in the same elaborate, expensive four-color separation and process printing as we use for the photography and art in the rest of the magazine.” It was a rich notion, and Hef paid for it — he reportedly paid the artists $4,000 a page for “Annie.” If that was the indeed the rate from the beginning, Kurtzman and Elder shared $140,000 for their nine stories the first year. Finally, they were getting some money.

The strip, shall we call it, certainly looked great. Hef’s demand that it be painted (tempera and watercolors) suited Elder’s ambitions as a fine artist. And though contributions to the panels by Davis, Heath, Frank Frazetta and other EC veterans sometimes jarred with the Elder overview, they added to the merry melange. (The whole series is available in two posh volumes from Dark Horse Comics.) A few good gags peeked through the artistry, like an episode on “the obscure Samoan island of Nakanuka,” where all the babies look like Marlon Brando (who had gone to live in the South Pacific and supposedly help populate the area with his offspring); and a Doomsday-movie burlesque, in which Annie thinks she hears an H-bomb explosion and her agent Solly (A Phil Silvers type) replies, “Not quite, sweetie-baby — that blast is 19th Century-Fox studio being torn down to make way for a supermarket!”

But as the artwork looked fuzzy — that is, lacked the definition of the MAD and Humbug years — and so did the humor. The stories took so long to produce, the satire was often outdated, almost nostalgic. The Doomsday-movie episode, which parodied “Dr. Strangelove” (released Jan. 64), “Seven Days in May” (Feb. 64) and “Fail-Safe” (Oct. 64), didn’t run till the October 65 issue. Other trend stories were similarly, fatally behind the curve.

And when stories did run, they were often ignorant. In the Dec. 65 episode “Annie Meets the Bleatles,” three of the four Beatles are misidentified, and the satire is concerned only with the funny way they talk. A 1968 story, which was storyboarded but never ran, deals with the Fab Four’s foray into Indian mysticism (where they visit the Maharishi Berrayogi). It begins with a parody of a Beatles number — “Oh we’re singing a song that doesn’t sound like a song ... and if you don’t like this song we don’t care, because we’re very rich” — that shows Kurtzman wasn’t superior to the group, he just didn’t get them. In his early 40s, he was prematurely crotchety. He had retreated into a reductive cynicism, whose one belief, and satirical tactic, argued that behind every purportedly noble trend lurked greed, lust or madness. Which may be true, but hammered into 109 episodes over 25 years, it ain’t that funny — at least not by the standards Kurtzman taught us to expect.

HARVEY THE ICON

So Kurtzman finally had the financial success, though on a smaller scale, that Feldstein would enjoy at MAD. Both occasionally felt straitjacketed by their employers — Kurtzman with the Playboy editors’ demands (“More tits!”), Feldstein with Gaines’ refusal to expand the MAD brand. In an interview with Jenn Dhigos on the Classic-Horror website, Al said he “was constantly pushing for ways to modernize and publicize the magazine...to bring it into the 80's, the 90's and the 21st Century...with detailed proposals for: a MAD TV Show (25 years ago, before ‘Saturday Night Live’), accepting ‘Real {but humorous} Ads’ (that would be created especially for the magazine by the ‘MAD Advertising Agency’), so that we could have Full-Color inside the magazine, a ‘live’ and ‘animated’ VHS version of MAD (today, it would be on CD!) that would be sold on newsstands and in TV Rental Stores, etc., etc., etc.” Feldstein left MAD in 1984, and said that Gaines “started to cut me out of the history of E.C. ... and MAD! Not only was I not consulted...I didn't even get screen credits for all of my stories that they adapted [in the Tales from the Crypt TV series]. Bill saw to that.”

Kurtzman settled into a routine that combined a few “Annie”s a year and teaching at New York’s School of Visual Arts. There he rarely spoke about his own work. His old acolytes did it for him. Spiegelman, on his visit, “decided to surprise Harvey. Instead of bringing slides of my work to his class, I brought slides of his work over the years — sort of a ‘This Is Your Life, Harvey Kurtzman.’ After all, seeing Harvey Kurtzman’s work when I was a kid was what made me wanna be a cartoonist in the first place.... I mean, Harvey Kurtzman has been the single most significant influence on a couple of generations of comics artists.... Basically, I told the students that their teacher was a World-class Genius. And from the back of the room, hoarsely, shyly, Harvey mumbled, ‘Listen to him. He knows whereof he speaks.”

Spiegelman’s tribute is published in “Harvey Kurtzman’s Strange Adventures,” a collaboration with several younger-generation artists, including Crumb, MAD’s Sergio Aragones and Kurtzman’s student, assistant and collaborator Sarah Downs. (No Elder, but that’s a different generation.) It was published three years before Harvey’s death, and was a way for some of the his fans — the people whose sensibilities he shaped, whose lives he changed — to say thanks. This column is another, smaller way, from someone who has spent 50 or his 60 years learning from and laughing with the first MAD man.

• Richard Corliss
• Richard Corliss on Harvey Kurtzman, founder of MAD and inspirer of the sharpest comedy of the last 50 years