FFB: MY LIFE AS A CARTOONIST by Harvey Kurtzman as told to Howard Zimmerman (Pocket/Minstrel 1988)

Harvey Kurtzman, of course, is best remembered as the founding editor of Mad comics, and magazine that made a point of not being a standard comic book in the aftermath of anti-comics activism (to put it mildly) in the early-mid 1950s (mostly focused on horror and crime comics, and Mad's publisher EC was one of the leaders in the horror field, at least)(the ferocity of the anti-horror comics backlash was so strong that historian Les Daniels credits it with helping kill the original run of Weird Tales, a fiction rather than comics magazine, in 1954, which had been struggling particularly in its last few years as a digest-sized magazine). And this is his only book-length memoir to be published, as a book for YA readers (Marijane Meaker being the only other creator of work for young readers and adults whose YA autobiography, Me Me Me Me Me: Not a Novel, was the only one I was aware of without any adult counterpart, and indeed the only one written, for some years, but she eventually followed up with the rather focused Highsmith: A Romance of the 1950s). Howard Zimmerman conducted and edited a series of interviews into the prose text of this book, and the deal was packaged by Byron Preiss. 

So, while the more adult aspects of Kurtzman's life and career are glossed over (to the extent that citations of Hugh Hefner's support of Kurtzman's post-Mad magazines, as publisher of Trump and less-invested benefactor to Humbug!, make no mention of Hefner's name nor Playboy, and no reference is made to the long-running Playboy strip, with Will Elder,  "Little Annie Fanny"), Kurtzman does give, along the way, bits of instruction on how to cartoon, and advice to the kids on how to draw and what to consider in seeking to make a career in commercial art. (He does risk mentioning writing and cartooning for Esquire.) And there's a reasonably generous selection of Kurtzman's first notable contributions to professional comics, the humorous one-page strip-series "Hey, Look!" that appeared in the Timely Comics magazines edited by Stan Lee, before the line would be redubbed Marvel Comics. The book is digest-sized, and all the interiors are in black and white on relatively low-quality paper, so the reproduction is just Acceptable but nice to have, and along with the "Hey, Look!"s there are less copious samples of work from all of Kurtzman's magazines, including EC's 1950s war comics and  the 1960-65 project Help!, the two volumes of the 1980s Bantam Books/Preiss-packaged YA anthology series Nuts!, and a complete (if black and white) reprint of a 1950 humorous western story, "Pot-Shot Pete".

It's to be regretted that a fuller account, aimed at adults, hasn't been assembled, nor was attempted, even given a few impressive biographies have been offered, but this book is a useful gloss on Kurtzman's life and career, and does touch on a few items, such as Nuts!, or the annual produced by his students for several years, kar*tunz, which are given even less mention in the other references I've read about HK. At the bottom of most of the pages, one can see an animated excerpt of one of Kurtzman's segments for Sesame Street, when flipped correctly...

For more of today's books, please see Patti Abbott's blog.

Below, assistant editor Gloria Steinem writing for Help! magazine, a couple of years before her famous Playboy Club "bunny" piece. Steinem was succeeded as assistant editor by Terry Gilliam, before his emigration to the UK and hooking up with the Monty Python crew.

Front and back cover of Nuts 2 and the table of contents:

HELP! magazine, February 1962: Harvey Kurtzman, Will Elder, Will Eisner, Algis Budrys, Stan Freberg, Don Edwing, Lydia Wilen et al...

Archive.org has the content up from several issues of Help!, the fourth and last of Harvey Kurtzman's humor magazines, and the one with the longest shadow after Mad, given the remarkable locus of talent that clustered around the magazine, even with its low budget and irregular publishing schedule (publisher James Warren, already doing well with Forrest Ackerman's Famous Monsters of Filmland and Spacemen but not yet also publishing Creepy, Eerie and Vampirella, famously never paid any more than he had to for anything). For starters, Kurtzman's primary editorial assistants, not quite overlapping, were Gloria Steinem and Terry Gilliam; Steinem notably was good at engaging famous and up-and-coming comedians to appear on the covers and in the photo-comics, in imitation of Italian and other traditions, dubbed in the magazine by the Italian term "fumetti"...Gilliam, before decamping to the UK in part to avoid being drafted after the magazine folded in 1965, was perhaps the great conduit for the budding "underground" cartoonists such as R. Crumb appearing in the magazine, before there was an underground scene...among the fumetti actors was a young British comedian performing in New York in an imported review, John Cleese, and he and Gilliam first met due to that gig.

This issue features the infamous "Goodman Goes Playboy" graphic story by Kurtzman and Will Elder, the segment of the adventures of Goodman Beaver that puts a Hallowe'en-appropriate twist on Archie Comics, as well as offering a few light jabs at Playboy (Hugh Hefner had been the publisher of the second Kurtzman magazine, Trump, which was closed down hurriedly due a cash crunch at Playboy Enterprises--and Kurtzman and Elder would later do a famous strip for Playboy magazine for decades).  The publishing troika at Archie Comics (see the 2024 comment below), always ready to take offense at any sort of parody (and who had done so at Mad's parody "Starchie" some years earlier), initiated court action. Also, a reprint of a Will Eisner "The Spirit" story, an Algis Budrys-scripted fumetti called "The Mariners" (featuring actress Lydia Wilen, who might also be the Wilen who with her sister has made a career of household hints books in more recent years), a transcript of part of one of Stan Freberg's albums, and cartoons by, among others, Don Edwing (who also has an acting role in the fumetti). Budrys placed several scripts with Help!, at least two with a nautical theme (boats being one of his interests).

Thanks to Dennis Lien for noting these Archive entries on Fiction-L. To see this issue legibly, go through this link, since the embed below doesn't seem to have a sufficient enlargement function.