http://www.nytimes.com/2009/08/09/books/review/Heller-t.html NY Times Book Review, August 9, 2009 Visuals The Art of Rebellion By STEVEN HELLER
If not for Mad magazine, there might never have been (in no particular order) 1960s youth culture, underground comics, Wacky Packs, “Laugh-In,” “Saturday Night Live,” R. Crumb, Art Spiegelman or an age of irony, period. Mad, which began in 1952 as a comic book that parodied “serious” comics as well as American popular culture, with an emphasis on television, movies and advertising, was conceived and originally edited by Harvey Kurtzman (1924-93), a Brooklyn-born comic-strip artist, writer and editor. Kurtzman was the spiritual father of postwar American satire and the godfather of late-20th-century alternative humor. If this seems like hyperbole, all you have to do is read The Art of Harvey Kurtzman: The Mad Genius of Comics (Abrams ComicArts, $40), Denis Kitchen and Paul Buhle’s insightful, entertaining and profusely illustrated (with rare images of original work) biographical monograph, which chronicles almost everything Kurtzman accomplished — and that was quite a lot. “In Mad and all his subsequent ventures,” the authors write, “Kurtzman drew a bead on the phony aspects and idiosyncrasies of modern commercial culture. . . . He took on Senator Joseph McCarthy as surely and seriously in the pages of Mad as Edward R. Murrow did on television.” He also fought against a wave of comic-art censorship that overtook the country in the ’50s and fostered the restrictive Comics Code (echoing the role of the Hays Office for motion pictures). Soon after World War II, Corporal Kurtzman made drawings for Yank, the Army’s weekly magazine. But his talents were really unleashed in his first comic-book job, doing so-called filler pages titled “Hey Look!” This was an absurdist collection of sequences produced for Stan Lee’s Timely Comics (later Marvel Comics) between 1946 and 1949. As Kitchen and Buhle point out, Kurtzman slid under the radar there and had “virtual free rein.” His distinctive, frenetic minimalism, condensed lettering and rebuslike signature (“H. Kurtz,” with a little figure of a “man” at the end) were developed during the course of this strip. It served as the steppingstone for some of his most historically significant contributions to comic art. In the late ’40s Kurtzman sold a short-lived experimental strip, “Silver Linings,” to The New York Herald Tribune, but it was his work with the legendary E.C. Comics that ignited his career. Founded by M. C. Gaines, a comics pioneer, and inherited by his son, Bill, the original Educational Comics company evolved from a formulaic publisher into a groundbreaker, taking on the name Entertaining Comics. Kurtzman was a force in this change. In 1950 he began drawing horror and sci-fi comics, including “Tales From the Crypt” and “Weird Science” — and thus a new, more vivid and gruesome style of comic was born. According to the authors, E.C.’s sci-fi comics became known for “antiracist intimations” and “warnings against atomic doomsday,” as well as “fantastically busty women in space outfits.” And “by 1953, E.C.’s horror titles had circulations hovering around 400,000 each.” (Today these comics are heralded as precursors to current horror films.) Among the most popular comics on the E.C. list were Kurtzman’s two war series, “Frontline Combat” and “Two-Fisted Tales,” which displayed a realism not present in similar comic books. Although Kurtzman honestly believed that gore was not suitable for children, he was nonetheless driven by a storyteller’s need to be truthful and not romanticize horror. In Kurtzman’s war stories, Kitchen and Buhle write, “rascals as well as moralists would meet their demise. . . . Redemption, if it could be found at all, demanded cleareyed understanding of frightful realities.” While Kurtzman is celebrated for the early days of Mad, his tales about the Korean War have been too often overlooked. They prefigure recent novels and films that demythologize warfare. In “Corpse on the Imjin!,” a six-page story he created for “Two-Fisted Tales,” war is embodied in a solitary G.I. watching an enemy corpse float downriver — the drawing of the half-submerged form is heartbreaking. As the soldier speculates on how the man died, he is set upon by a North Korean and becomes entangled in vividly choreographed hand-to-hand combat. After the Korean is killed, the American engages in some soul-searching. “Kurtzman’s thoughtful, more realistic and human depictions of war,” the authors write, “were in stark contrast with competing gung-ho war comic books that glorified war, almost never displayed moral ambiguity and frequently featured Koreans as garishly yellow-skinned and bucktoothed ‘gooks.’ ” After largely concentrating on war, he decided to turn to humor, and Mad was “Kurtzman’s baby from the first moment of its conceptualization.” For the first 23 issues it was a comic book, but Kurtzman had long wanted to edit a “slick” magazine, in an effort to legitimize the comic medium. Bill Gaines resisted for some time, but the July 1955 issue marked a radical format change (Kurtzman designed the illuminated logo that identified Mad for decades). It was so successful it prompted an immediate reprint. Actually, the altered format was propitious: since Mad was no longer a comic book, it was not subject to the Comics Code, which had severe consequences for E.C. Kitchen, an underground comic artist and publisher, and Buhle, a historian of comics, superbly chronicle the rise of E.C. and its fall at the hands of restrictive Congressional investigations — in 1954 Senator Estes Kefauver opened hearings in New York investigating sadism and racism in comics, with Bill Gaines as “his chief (hostile) witness” — and a cowardly, self-regulating comic-book industry. The liberal psychologist Fredric Wertham had charged in his book “Seduction of the Innocent” that comics harmed children. Although Mad could have been condemned under this blanket indictment, the fact that it was no longer a comic book saved it from certain demise. Kurtzman eventually left Mad to work on various other, lesser-known humor magazines: Trump (published by Hugh Hefner), Humbug, and Help! (which prefigured National Lampoon). For a generation of boomers who grew up hoarding Playboy, his collaboration with the artist Will Elder on a comic strip about the buxom Little Annie Fanny — the anti-Betty and anti-Veronica — provided a teenage rite of passage. I have another memory of Kurtzman. A few years before he died, I was with him at a restaurant when he was having a brief meeting with an art director from an ad agency. Kurtzman had accepted an advertising job to earn some much-needed cash. I watched this iconoclastic humorist acquiesce as the art director altered everything Kurtzman had done, removing all the humor and leaving only the style. Maybe it’s a good thing the authors were unaware of this anecdote; their book is probably better off without it. (clip) ________________________________________________ YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. Send list submissions to: [email protected] Set your options at: http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/options/marxism/archive%40mail-archive.com
