The Art of Harvey Kurtzman: The Mad Genius of Comics (Abrams ComicArts, $40) begins with startling, sweeping statements of its subject’s importance not just to comics, but to American culture as a whole. Time critic Richard Corliss asserts that “almost all American satire today follows a formula that Harvey Kurtzman thought up.” In his introduction, Harry Shearer declares that without Kurtzman there would be no Saturday Night Live or Simpsons.
He may well be correct. Harvey Kurtzman (1924-1993) was the founder and original editor of MAD, as well as one of its best writers. In its early days MAD was more daring and genuinely innovative, pioneering satiric attacks on postwar media culture. But Kurtzman had already proved himself the master of dramatic realism in comics through his war comics. He was the spiritual father of the underground cartoonists of the 1960s, and the forebear of today’s alternative comics as well.
The Art of Harvey Kurtzman is a collaboration between underground comix artist and publisher Denis Kitchen, who represents the Kurtzman estate, and Brown University scholar Paul Buhle. Together with Abrams, they have created a superbly handsome art book that amounts to a museum retrospective of Kurtzman’s entire career. So impressively does this book make the case for Kurtzman’s greatness that readers will surely be puzzled that his talent went nearly unrecognized by the mainstream culture for decades.
No serious library of comics art should be without this book, which provides a dazzling array of Kurtzman’s promising early work, including numerous examples of his experimental humor strip Hey, Look!
Kurtzman’s first masterworks were the war stories for EC’s Two-Fisted Tales and Frontline Combat that he edited, wrote and either drew or laid out for other artists to finish. The Abrams volume reprints the classic “Corpse on the Imjin!” which exemplifies the fatalism the authors find in Kurtzman’s war stories, as well as Kurtzman’s emphasis on the horrifying brutality of war and his vividly energetic visual storytelling. It remains remarkable that Kurtzman’s harrowing, ironic vision proved successful in a supposed children’s medium when war stories in other media of the time often celebrated battle as patriotic.
Understandably, the book emphasizes the sophisticated aspects of Kurtzman’s MAD work, reprinting “Superduperman,” a deconstruction of the superhero genre, revealing Clark Kent to be an obsessive “creep,” and demonstrating that his fantasy self of Superman would suffer from the same character flaws. Another MAD story here, “3 Dimensions,” is comics metafiction, toying with the visual conventions of the art form. Yet both stories also revel in low slapstick, goofy caricatures, and infectiously “adolescent” humor that the book tends to overlook, but which is an enduring part of the MAD style.
Over the course of a chapter, the book presents a gallery of each cover from the Kurtzman run on MAD, revealing a remarkable range of experimentation that no magazine or comic comes close to rivaling today.
Kurtzman’s run lasted merely three years before he had a falling out with publisher William Gaines and went on to launch a succession of new humor magazines—Trump, Humbug, and Help—which, however they may have impressed discerning readers, all quickly failed. It is astounding to see the talents who were associated with these magazines (Gloria Steinem, Terry Gilliam, Woody Allen and Robert Crumb, among others.) It seems mysterious that MAD succeeded while Kurtzman’s other brainchildren didn’t. Could it be that Kurtzman was aiming too high above the heads of the majority of the young MAD audience? Or was he simply too early for the National Lampoon readership to come? (Humbug was recently reprinted in a deluxe edition by Fantagraphics, for those who want to judge for themselves.)
One of the book’s themes is that Kurtzman was repeatedly ahead of his time. For example, the authors make a strong case that Kurtzman was a pioneer of the graphic novel, citing his Jungle Book and reprinting his powerfully expressionistic retelling of Dickens, “Marley’s Ghost.” The authors present Kurtzman’s decision to spend over two decades working on the raunchy and sometimes lurid “Little Annie Fanny” with favorite collaborator Will Elder for Playboy magazine as a Faustian bargain. After years of financial struggle, Kurtzman was royally recompensed for a tiny number of pages per year, at the price of lacking creative control or ownership. The authors concede that Annie ranks below Kurtzman’s great early work. Still, a highlight of this volume is the reproduction on vellum of Kurtzman’s many preparatory studies for a single Annie page, culminating with Elder’s finished version.
Like other recent biographies of major comics creators, the Kurtzman book does not provide much sense of its subject’s personality. (Ironically, Blake Bell’s book about the reclusive Steve Ditko was the exception to this rule.) There are tantalizing hints - for example, the book reveals that after his father’s death, the four-year-old Kurtzman was put in an orphanage until his mother remarried. The authors observe that this must have been traumatic, but how might it have influenced his adult work? Towards the end of the book one of Kurtzman’s students gives a warmly affectionate description of him as a teacher, and for a moment Kurtzman seems vividly present before the reader. This book is called The Art of Harvey Kurtzman, which means that a biography drawing on the reminiscences of others about Kurtzman the man is still to be written.
For an example of Kurtzman's influence, one need only turn to another recent comics retrospective. Originally published from 1964 to 1965 by publisher James Warren and edited and almost entirely written by Archie Goodwin, Blazing Combat was their impressive effort at recapturing and the spirit of Kurtzman’s EC war books. Readers can see for themselves in the newly released Blazing Combat hardcover collection (Fantagraphics Books, $19.99), which reprints this entire short-lived but magnificent series.
In a 1993 interview included in the collection, the late Archie Goodwin declares that he would not even have known how to construct the war stories in Blazing Combat without Kurtzman’s example at EC. Goodwin’s stories are not pale imitations but powerful and vivid. Like the EC war books, they range through human history, as if humanity cannot escape war. Battles are portrayed as chaotic, and killing as brutal; soldiers are doomed by their own character flaws.
In his own interview in this collection, Warren calls Goodwin a prophet. Indeed, Goodwin opposed the Vietnam War early on. The book recounts how outrage at one story, “Landscape,” in which a village is destroyed in the conflict between American forces and the Viet Cong, forced the comic’s cancellation after only four issues. Even now, Blazing Combat seems eerily relevant to contemporary times, as in the protagonist’s revulsion at seeing prisoners tortured in the opening story.
Blazing Combat demonstrates Goodwin achieving true greatness as a comics writer, but it is also an astonishing showcase for many of the leading comics artists of their day like Wally Wood, Joe Orlando and John Severin, Russ Heath, and Gene Colan. Many of were them EC veterans, all working in a realistic, illustrative tradition far different from the superhero comics of the Sixties, while the stylized dramatic art of Alex Toth stands out from the rest.
In his interview Goodwin observes that the Kurtzman tradition tends to be “overlooked” because the comics industry went in a different direction. The Abrams Kurtzman book and Blazing Combat should help correct this imbalance.
