Harvey Kurtzman
Harvey Kurtzman was an American cartoonist and editor. His best-known work includes writing and editing the parodic comic book Mad from 1952 until 1956, and writing the Little Annie Fanny strips in Playboy from 1962 until 1988. His work is noted for its satire and parody of popular culture, social critique, and attention to detail. Kurtzman's working method has been likened to that of an auteur, and he expected those who illustrated his stories to follow his layouts strictly.
Kurtzman began to work on the New Trend line of comic books at EC Comics in 1950. He wrote and edited the Two-Fisted Tales and Frontline Combat war comic books, where he also drew many of the carefully researched stories, before he created his most-remembered comic book, Mad, in 1952. Kurtzman scripted the stories and had them drawn by top EC cartoonists, most frequently Will Elder, Wally Wood, and Jack Davis; the early Mad was noted for its social critique and parodies of pop culture. The comic book switched to a magazine format in 1955, and Kurtzman left it in 1956 over a dispute with EC's owner William Gaines over financial control. Following his departure, he did a variety of cartooning work, including editing the short-lived Trump and the self-published Humbug. In 1959, he produced the first book-length work of original comics, the adult-oriented, satirical Jungle Book. He edited the low-budget Help! from 1960 to 1965, a humor magazine which featured work by future Monty Python member and film director Terry Gilliam and the earliest work of underground cartoonists such as Robert Crumb and Gilbert Shelton. He brought Help! to an end after the success of the risqué Playboy feature Little Annie Fanny began to take up his time. While Annie Fanny provided much of his income for the rest of his career, he continued to produce an eclectic body of work, including screenwriting the animated Mad Monster Party? in 1967 and directing, writing and designing several shorts for Sesame Street in 1969.
From 1973, Kurtzman taught cartooning at the School of Visual Arts in New York. His work gained greater recognition toward the end of his life, and he oversaw deluxe reprintings of much of his work. The Harvey Award was named in Kurtzman's honor in 1988. He was inducted into the Will Eisner Comic Book Hall of Fame in 1989, and his work earned five positions on The Comics Journals Top 100 Comics of the 20th Century.
Personal and professional history
Early life (1924–1942)
Harvey Kurtzman spoke little of his parents in interviews, and not much is known of their pre-American lives. David Kurtzman and Edith Sherman grew up in Ukraine in Odesa, and were literate urbanites. They belonged to the city's large Jewish community, one that suffered generations of antisemitic oppression, and the city had fallen into economic hardship following the Russian Revolution. Shortly after World War I David emigrated to New York and Edith soon followed in what she called "a desperate journey" escaping the new Soviet Union. There the non-observant pair married in a civil ceremony. The first of their two sons, Zachary, was born April 8, 1923.Harvey Kurtzman was born on October 3, 1924, in a tenement building on 428 East Ninety-Eighth Street in Brooklyn in New York City. David joined the Christian Science church, and when he suffered a bleeding ulcer he turned to prayer to cure it; he died from it on November 29, 1928, at age 36. The family was in such desperate financial straits that their mother placed the Kurtzman brothers in an orphanage for three months until she secured work as a milliner. Several months later, Edith remarried to Russian-Jewish immigrant Abraham Perkes, who worked in the printing industry as a brass engraver. The Kurtzman boys kept their surname, while their mother took that of Perkes. The couple had a son Daniel on February 17, 1931. In 1934, the family moved to the more upscale Bronx, where the family lived at 2166 Clinton Avenue.
Perkes was not wealthy, but managed to provide for his family during the Great Depression of the 1930s. He was a trade unionist, and the couple read the communist newspaper Daily Worker. Perkes brought young Kurtzman to work, and encouraged him to help with design and drawing and to think of himself as a professional artist.
Though he was a shy boy his teachers recognized Kurtzman's intelligence in grade school and allowed him to skip a grade. He displayed artistic talent early and his sidewalk chalk drawings drew the attention of children and adults, who gathered around to watch him draw. He called these strips "Ikey and Mikey", inspired by Goldberg's comic strip Mike and Ike. His stepfather also had an interest in art and took the boys to museums. His mother encouraged his artistic development and enrolled him in art lessons; on Saturdays, he took the subway to Manhattan for formal art instruction. His parents had him attend the left-leaning Jewish Camp Kinderland, but he did not enjoy its dogmatic atmosphere. Though not ashamed of their Jewish heritage, neither of the Kurtzman brothers agreed to have a Bar Mitzvah.
Kurtzman fell in love with comic strips and the newly emerging comic books in the late 1930s. Unsatisfied with what he found in his parents' newspapers, he searched through garbage cans for the Sunday comics sections of his neighbors' newspapers. He admired a wide variety of strips, including Hamlin's Alley Oop, Caniff's Terry and the Pirates, Gould's Dick Tracy, Foster's Prince Valiant, Raymond's Flash Gordon, and Capp's Li'l Abner. He found Will Eisner's comic book The Spirit a "standard by which other comic books would be measured", and called Eisner "the greatest ... a virtuoso cartoonist of a kind who had never been seen before". Eisner's page layouts had considerable influence on Kurtzman's work.
At 14 Kurtzman won a cartooning contest for which he received a dollar and had his cartoon published in Tip Top Comics 36. Future collaborator Jack Davis had won the same contest a few issues earlier. After winning the annual John Wanamaker Art Contest, Kurtzman received a scholarship to attend high school at The High School of Music & Art. Future colleagues Will Elder, Al Feldstein, Al Jaffee, John Severin, and Charles Stern also attended the school. His ambitions were apparent even then; at a 2016 New York Comic Con panel, Jaffee recounted how a 15-year-old Kurtzman told his fellow students Jaffee and Elder "Someday I'm going to have a magazine, and I'm going to hire you guys." Kurtzman graduated at 16 in 1941 and went on to Cooper Union on a scholarship. Kurtzman left after a year to focus on making comic books.
Early career (1942–1949)
Kurtzman met Alfred Andriola in 1942, encouraged by a quote in Martin Sheridan's Classic Comics and their Creators where Andriola offered help to aspiring cartoonists. Kurtzman made an appointment, but Andriola's response to his work was discouraging—he told Kurtzman to give up on cartooning. Kurtzman called this meeting "one of the worst days of life", though he ignored Andriola's advice and continued to peddle his portfolio.Kurtzman continued to do odd jobs in 1942 until he got his first break in the comics industry at Louis Ferstadt's studio, which produced comics for Quality, Ace, Gilberton, and the Daily Worker. His first published work there was assisting on issue #5 of Gilberton's Classic Comics, which features an adaptation of Moby Dick. His first pencil job appeared in Four Favorites #8. He produced a large amount of undistinguished work in 1942 and 1943, which he later called "very crude, very ugly stuff", before he was drafted in 1943 for service in World War II.
Kurtzman trained for the infantry, but was never sent overseas. He was stationed in Louisiana, North Carolina, South Carolina, and Texas. He illustrated instruction manuals, posters, and flyers, and contributed cartoons to camp newspapers, and newsletters. While on furlough, he was invited by editor and cartoonist L. B. Cole to draw the "Black Venus" superheroine, packaged for publisher Rae Herman's Orbit Publications. Kurtzman did two Black Venus stories, his first comics work all in brushwork, which were published in Contact Comics in 1945 and 1946. In 1944 he also did freelance work for several local publications while stationed in North Carolina, and had several gag cartoons in Yank by the end of October 1945. The quantity of work allowed Kurtzman to hone his style, which became more refined and distinct.
After his discharge following the war, Kurtzman found competition fierce in the comics industry, as freelancing replaced the system of packaging shops. He applied to the newspaper PM, but his portfolio was rejected by cartoon editor Walt Kelly. After a series of short-lived assignments and partnerships, Kurtzman got together with former Music and Art alumni Will Elder and Charles Stern. They opened Charles William Harvey Studio in 1947, but had difficulty getting work. The three had little business sense. Kurtzman managed the bills. In their Broadway studio, which Kurtzman kept open until the end of 1951, they sublet space to cartoonists such as John Severin, Dave Berg, and René Goscinny.
Kurtzman had been doing crossword puzzles for publisher Martin Goodman since early in his career. A distant relative of Goodman's, Stan Lee, worked as an editor for Goodman's Timely Comics. He offered Kurtzman work doing one-page fillers, work that paid little. Lee named the strip Hey Look!, and Kurtzman produced 150 episodes of it from 1946 until 1949.
At a Music and Art reunion in early 1946 Kurtzman met Adele Hasan, who was one of the staff members at Timely and was dating Will Elder. She fell for Kurtzman, confiding to Al Jaffee that he "was the kind of kind like to marry". Later in the year, Timely ran a "Now You Can Be the Editor!" contest whose ballots Hasan was assigned to sort through. She was disappointed that readers did not enjoy Kurtzman's Hey Look! as much as she did. She "stuffed the ballot box" in Kurtzman's favor, which prompted an astonished Stan Lee to assign Kurtzman more work. Kurtzman was given the talking animal feature Pigtales at regular freelance rates, as well as miscellaneous other assignments. As Harvey stopped by the Timely offices more frequently, he and Adele would flirt, and eventually started dating. She left Timely for college that autumn, and corresponded frequently with Kurtzman; soon she dropped out of college and the two married that September.
In 1948 Kurtzman produced a Sunday comic strip, Silver Linings, which ran infrequently in the New York Herald Tribune between March and June. Lee had Hey Look! brought to an end in 1949 so Kurtzman could concentrate on longer features for Timely's family-oriented line. Kurtzman was assigned artwork duties for the Lee-scripted Rusty, an imitation of Chic Young's comic strip Blondie, but was disappointed with this type of work and began looking for other employment. He sold episodes of the one-pagers Egghead Doodle and Genius to Timely and Al Capp's Toby Press on a freelance basis. He also sold longer pieces to Toby, including episodes of his Western parody Pot Shot Pete, a short-lived series that hinted at the pop-culture satire Kurtzman was to become known for.
Kurtzman came across Charles Biro's Crime Does Not Pay, a comic book Kurtzman describes as reading with "the same excitement ... that felt about the underground comic books of twenty years later". These stories presented a view of reality quite different from the escapist entertainment typical of comics of the day, and was to influence the war and social drama work Kurtzman was soon to do at EC Comics.