FFB: SECOND HELP!-ING, edited by Harvey Kurtzman (Fawcett Gold Medal 1962)(and HELP! magazine, 3/65); THE MONOCLE PEEP SHOW edited by Richard Lingerman and Victor Navasky (Bantam 1965); THE REALIST edited by Paul Krassner (1958-2001, online archive completed 2010)

The late 1950s and early '60s saw a small flurry of satirical magazines, in the wake of the early/mid 1950s boomlet of satirical comics, in both standard comic-book format and, later, in roughly 8.5 x 11" magazine format, in imitation of Mad, founded by Harvey Kurtzman at EC Comics. After the establishment of comics industry self-policing after the popular embrace of Fredric Wertham's Seduction of the Innocent and similar attempts to blame juvenile deliquency on comics (among other "perverting" factors in popular culture), EC decided to publish Mad in the more adult-oriented format, and Kurtzman, for various reasons, demanded a percentage of ownership in the new version that EC's William Gaines was unwilling to offer. So, Kurtzman walked, and went on to eventually three other magazine projects, Trump (published by Hugh Hefner, and cut short by a financial crunch at Playboy Enterprises), Humbug! (published by Kurtzman and some associates themselves, and undercapitalized), and (after a 1959 collection, Harvey Kurtzman's Jungle Book, of original work for Ballantine), beginning in 1960, Help!, as a project at James Warren's publishing house, which at the time was best-known for Forrest J Ackerman's Famous Monsters of Filmland, and was getting into the large-sized comics business with such titles as Creepy and Eerie, which would eventually be joined by Vampirella. Warren was never a publisher to spend any more money than he had to, and Help! reflected its small budget (and, after an initial year of nearly monthly publication, became essentially a quarterly for the rest of its run, to the end of 1965) and some of the lack of certainty of exactly whom its audience was that had been more easily ignored at Kurtzman's previous projects. There was a sexual undertone to much of the humor, particularly in the photographic comics-style "fumetti" stories, and bits of discreet nudity, that was mostly absent from Mad, certainly, but still a certain tendency to go for the rather easy, and sometimes the rather kidsy, joke. But, despite those limitations, Help! was a locus of some rather remarkable talent, in both magazine publication and the broader world of comics and comedy; Kurtzman's first editorial assistant was Gloria Steinem, who apparently was particularly adept at talking well-known comedians and comic actors into posing for the magazine's covers, and occasionally getting them to work as fumetti actors/models (including Orson Bean, Jean Shepherd, and Jack Carter, though usually less well-known comics were employed in the photoplays...such as Woody Allen, or a visiting Briton, then in the US with a small Oxbridge Fringe-style troupe trying their luck with NYC audiences, John Cleese...by the time Cleese's strip appeared in the magazine, Steinem had moved on and was replaced as primary assistant by a young Minneapolis cartoonist, Terry Gilliam, who worked with Cleese on that shoot...and both would later work together in London on Monty Python's Flying Circus). Meanwhile, writers such as Peter De Vries, Roger Price, Algis Budrys, Robert Sheckley, Ray Bradbury, Rod Serling, Stan Freberg, Joan Rivers and (primarily a book editor) Bernard Shir-Cliff were contributing text pieces and fumetti scripts to the magazine (alongside reprinted work of Saki and Ambrose Bierce), veteran cartoonists such as Jack Davis, Paul Coker (among many of Kurtzman's associates at Mad and later), Edward Gorey, Gahan Wilson and Shel Silverstein were contributing panels and strips, and younger cartoonists also making their names in "underground" comics were contributing, such as Gilbert Shelton and his superhero-parody "Wonder Warthog" stories, R. Crumb, Jay Lynch, and others; Sid and Marty Krofft, the psychedelic puppeteers, had a piece in one issue.

So, such collections as Second Help!-ing, or the 23rd issue of the magazine (only three issues before the last), could individually seem a bit thin, but there are always solid and memorable bits, and both the evidence of what the assembled were capable of, and the since-fulfilled promise of many of the new faces on display (even if such come-ons as Jerry Lewis's tiresome piece leading off the Fawcett Gold Medal collection, or Alan Seus, of all emerging one-note performers, engaging in a weak cover-gag on the issue, were indicative of what was least about the project).

Monocle, for its part, had the most common sort of roots among US satiric magazines: it began as a late 1950s campus project, among some law students at Yale, including the co-editor of the volume cited above, Victor Navasky (who went on to serve as editor and then also publisher for The Nation magazine over most of the last four decades). The students took their cue from Mort Sahl and other emerging satirical comedians, and then Paul Krassner's The Realist, and eventually began publishing in earnest a rather well-written and well-designed irregularly issued magazine, in the sort of tall, thin format favored till recently by Foreign Affairs magazine (or am I thinking of Foreign Policy?) Boasting of contributions by regulars such as Calvin Trillin, Marvin Kitman (put up as a Republican Party presidential contender, against Goldwater in the primaries, by the magazine), fiction writer C.D.B. Bryan, and co-editor Richard Lingerman, the contributions can feel a bit notional at this remove, literary Second City scenes that don't quite hit their targets as hard as might've been hoped...but such pieces as Godfrey Cambridge's "My Taxi Problem and Ours" (simultaneously dealing, early on, with the difficulties of even a well-off black man hailing a cab in NYC, and mocking the title and format of a certain clangorous, and racist, Norman Podhoretz essay of some months before), or Katherine Perlo's poem "The Triumphant Defeat of Jordan Stone", hold up pretty well...as do various other bits here and there, including challenging one-liners (under the heading, "We're Not Prejudiced, But...", "Would you want your brother to have lunch with James Baldwin?") and Robert Grossman's superhero satire strip "Captain Melanin". This Monocle should definitely not be confused with the current newsstand magazine founded in 2007. It should be noted that this "Bantam Extra" book was published in typical mass-market paperback format, and on better-than-average paper, for what was in 1965 a ridiculous price of $1, ensuring some sales-suppression...perhaps Bantam thought they had caviar for the millions, here. 

 And since I'm running very late with this entry, I'll simply note that the online archive of The Realist, which I've recommended before, remains available and invaluable, and much of this material remains as challenging and sadly too often pertinent as when it was published, beginning in 1958... For more of today's books, please see Patti Abbott's blog.

FFB: THE SINCEREST FORM OF PARODY ed. John Benson (Fantagraphics 2012); Tom Reed: THE BLACK MUSIC HISTORY OF LOS ANGELES: 1920s-70s (BALA Press 1992)

Two volumes devoted to lavish sampling of the imagery and history of underappreciated pop-culture, the one of the 1950s, the other of the half-century in and around what was becoming the country's Second City, and disputed capital of performing arts and their recording. Two good books, worthy of attention, but flawed (particularly as published) and perhaps more expensive than they might be...but labor-intensive labors of love. And it'd be hard to gainsay the books' progenitors.

John Benson, in his historical essay accompanying the selections from the comic books that arose, imitatively, in the wake of the sudden success of Mad in 1953-54, notes that as a passionate young fan of Mad who couldn't get enough of Harvey Kurtzman's innovative satirical comic, he would scour the drugstores and other newsstands in shops up and down Haddon Avenue, a mile or so away as I write this, from Cherry Hill to Camden, New Jersey, hoping to get a Methadone sustaining fix from the issues of mayfly imitators he could pick up (comics publishing has always been irregular at best, with unreliable schedules augmented, if that's the word, by genuinely awful newsstand distribution at least until the advent of the direct-sales stores). (That probably makes Benson old enough to have the kind of eyesight that doesn't appreciate the kind of microtype in which Fantagraphics chose to print his essay, and particularly his footnotes, and Jay Lynch's introduction; I certainly don't, at some decades younger.) The comic stories and one-panel/page images reprinted here are a mildly representative survey of the various titles in standard comics format, with at least one example from the publications of nine different publishing entities, usually established comics imprints (EC itself with the Al Feldstein-edited Mad ripoff Panic, Charlton, Atlas [which would eventually become Marvel], Harvey) as well as packagers for smaller or less durable companies, and at least one startup, Mikeross, which EC essentially sued out of existence, Benson suggests for being a little too good at mocking EC at their own game. Mikeross's Get Lost! has apparently been collected in at least one other in-print anthology, so Benson mostly includes here only the rather deft parody of an EC Feldstein horror comic that, along with aping the cover format of Mad and Panic rather closely and being handled and partially bankrolled by EC's distributor, might've brought EC's particularly focused wrath upon them. The other fake Mads didn't usually manage to arise to the level of Get Lost!'s sample story, though Al Feldstein's lampoon of Mike Hammer for Panic is another highlight of the book (among the supplementary images collected here is Marie Severin's sketch of Feldstein poring through I, the Jury before writing his script). And, of course, Panic as an EC title has been (at times lavishly) anthologized in a way that Bughouse and Flip! (probably Benson's least- and most-favored imitators, respectively) have not been. And the reproduction here, including of some battered covers (presumably from Benson's childhood collection, though that isn't made clear) as well as pristine page-layouts, is excellent; my colleague and comics fan Jeff Cantwell notes that he's always gratified when no attempt is made to saturate the colors of "Golden-" and "Silver-Age" beyond those of the original images as presented. (The pages of the book do, however, have a slightly odd scent, perhaps in large part because of the kind of ink used, rather than the heavy and perhaps acid-free paper.) And while Benson is careful to mention the relatively few 8.5 x 11" magazines that immediately followed Mad's conversion away from the standard comics format (and a few latter-day imitators such as Marvel's Crazy, launched at the height of Mad magazine's 1970s success and as a part of a line of Marvel "oversized" comics), Benson doesn't note the college humor magazines that were already fellow-travelers of Mad comics in the '50s and earlier, nor such latter-day standard-comics-format titles as DC's Plop! and Marvel's Not Brand Echh; Benson is careful to note, however, that even as at EC, often the satire titles were the mutant cousins of the horror comics (as Plop! certainly was in the 1970s). And as Roger Price noted about the not quite Onlie Begetter of all this ferment at the time, you could always use this book to quiet the hum of one's potrzebie.

Longtime LA dj Tom Reed's The Black Music History of Los Angeles, Its Roots: A Classical Pictorial History of Black Music in L.A. from 1920-1970 (one is probably not too far wrong in suspecting publisher Black Accent LA Press is essentially Reed himself) is also a slightly odd physical specimen, printed rather obviously in the manner of a high-school yearbook, heavy slick paper, textured boards and all, only with a dust jacket featuring excellent reproduction of photos of Dexter Gordon on the front, Nancy Wilson on the back, and no lack of other fine shots of jazz, pop and gospel performers inside, along with images of memorabilia (record labels, ads for concerts and broadcast shows, etc.) and relatively sparse and nostalgic text (no problem reading these typefaces!). In fact, the scrapbookish miscellany here lends itself to the yearbook formatting, and plethora of signed photographs and such simply reinforces that appropriateness. Less a reference about than a celebration of its subject, it's a book that will make even more sense as a web album some day soon...where one might actually hear some of these brilliant artists (including a few, like Redd Foxx, who were not primarily musicians) at work along with seeing the candids and professional portraiture. La Melle Prince, in her 1950s cowgirl outfit, cheek by jowl with a famous picture of Jelly Roll Morton gazing moodily at his piano. Louis Jordan (and Tympani Five) a few pages away from the Raclets.


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

F(uture) Forgotten Books: Drunk Stoned Brilliant Dead: The Writers and Artists Who Made the National Lampoon Insanely Great, edited by Rick Meyerowitz

So, I looked at this, an example of long-term art-book publisher Abrams's newish program of moving solidly into publishing books about and collecting comics materials (a trend I applaud, as I suspect do their accountants), and it powerfully reminded me of how much I enjoyed, even when I was mildly disgusted by, the National Lampoon in the '73-'76 period when I first became aware of it and was able to gain somewhat inconsistent access to it (I was, after all, ages 8-12). My mother angrily brought me and one issue I bought back to the drugstore where I'd purchased it, for example (the same place I'd ride my banana-seat bike down to buy my "mainstream" comics, and where I'd seen my first Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, and where I'd buy my father a copy of Harry Harrison's anthology Nova 4 in its Mentor Books edition for his birthday...if Mentor and Charlton Comics were mobbed up, there was a certain logic to them being easily available in my Hazardville [Hammett fans take note] neighborhood). But what strikes me as particularly interesting is how much of this book, concentrating on the consensus-best years of the magazine, is familiar to me from those years...I think Meyerowitz, perhaps intentionally, missed the comic dinosaur spread that I recall enjoying enormously. Meyerowitz makes some not necessarily popular editorial judgement (he makes a Large Point of reprinting the splash-page illustrations for John Hughes's "My Vagina" and "My Penis" while refusing to reprint the short stories themselves, which he considers jejune and trite and examples of how NatLamp went wrong in the Animal House years and later). And there's the rub, here...much of this stuff doesn't hold up well for me at all...jejune and trite and self-conscious naughtiness are all over the place, but most of the wit is simply epater Mom & Pop and Teacher. Even Mad, and Plop!, and infrequently Cracked in the same years would dig a little deeper at times, not having quite the recourse to the sexual themes and skin-magazine imagery that so angered my mother. So, this is a tribute to an era of the magazine when it was part of the wedge that would also include the Lampoon's radio series, stage shows, budding film career (and such proto-NL projects as The Groove Tube) and, most sustainedly, Saturday Night Live. But, what it's not, particularly when compared to such other inputs of the time that I was experiencing as the Ballantine reprints of the first years of Mad then still widely in print, The Mad Reader and more, is brilliant work that will live forever, even when done by such often brilliant people as Anne Beatts, Gahan Wilson, and Tony Hendra. Oddly enough, even Mr. Mike O'Donoghue often did better when someone might tell him, No, do it again and differently.

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

10 magazines

What ten books most influenced the list-makers, asks George Kelley? How about the ten
magazines?

1. Unknown pulp sf reprint magazine. One of my two earliest remembered reading experiences (story about an alien who could transmigrate consciousness...swap bodies...with the protag, who described how he suddenly was in a tentacled body...after all these years, I wonder if I'd honed in on one of the reprint stories in a late '60s Amazing), the other being an unknown DC science fictional comic. I read Seuss and easy-reader Grimm earlier, but these are the first I remember. This would've been in 1968-69.

2. Children's Digest and Humpty Dumpty. Fascinating in their variety. Highlights, too.

3. Dynamite. The Scholastic Book Services magazine that was sheer charm and funny trivia. Runner up for this slot: Boy's Life.

4. Comics, particularly the horrors, and Mad. Particularly Weird War Tales from DC (and its militating against war); Tomb of Darkness from Marvel, Atlas/Timely reprints from the days they went head to head with EC's industry-shaking horrors; and the odd title such as Charlton's Ghost Manor and its early '70s importing of short ghost manga, or Gold Key's rather well-written Twilight Zone. Of course, the books collecting the Kurtzman Mad and its immediate aftermath were funnier than the current one, but the curent one was worth getting...ahead, in the middle '70s, of even National Lampoon (despite the sexy parts of NatLamp...but that's what stolen Playboys were for) given the relatively frequent recourse to the easy laugh in NL, to say nothing of the basic sadness of Cracked and Crazy...though DC's Plop! was gratifyingly weird. Not terribly funny, but interesting.


5. Fiction magazines. See approximately half the posts in this blog, including this one to a limited extent.

6. Playboy. Endlessly fascinating to the 9-13yo me, for all the obvious reasons coinciding oddly enough with puberty's onset, and perhaps the not so obvious...it almost, beyond the nudes, seemed to rival the generalist magazines for kids in the range of topics addressed, though even at nine it seemed odd to me that some of the pictorials showed fully-dressed men with naked women...wasn't he interested in the fun to be had?

7. The Atlantic Monthly...now, finally, in 1978, I'd found a magazine that was the adult equivalent of Children's Digest or Highlights...just as eclectic. Pity it kept getting duller and duller as the years passed, almost as staid, finally, as Shawn's New Yorker...but, happily, Harper's, previously Atlantic's Brand X, remade itself into something even more interesting in 1984.

8. Science Fiction Review. The first important sf fanzine I read, soon followed by Algol in the process of becoming, briefly, Starship, the entrees to my first subculture, albeit I've remained essentially an amused fringefan throughout the years since.

8. Downbeat. The first music magazine I read (ca. 1978), and it paved the way for the other interesting music magazines I would also pick up over the years. Now that I haven't read Rolling Stone regularly for a quarter century and haven't been keeping up with Maximum RockNRoll (which I also, if trivially, contributed to), I still pick up Downbeat and Jazz Times, and would Cadence if it was still with us [update: which it is!]. (Cadence and JT columnists were Far too kind to my jazz fanzine pretty obscure; jazz notes and unpopular culture in review...in part I think because they wanted to encourage the example.)

10. Our Generation. Even more than the rest of the anarchist press extant in the 1980s, ranging from the bitter one-man labor of printer's love The Match! through Fifth Estate through Social Anarchism (to which I would contribute; my brother provided a cover for that issue, a reprint from the front page of a collective magazine we put out with my ex and two other friends, (in*sit)) to Profane Existence (a long letter there from me was quoted in someone's PhD thesis that was published as a trade book, I learned on the same day I bought my first car...now there's a load of mixed emotions for you)...even more than all the others (Freedom and Anarchist Review from across the Atlantic...), the Canadian Our Generation spoke to me with its long contributions from Noam Chomsky, Murray Bookchin, Janet Biehl and others who were trying create a pragmatic libertarian socialism, and, where that wasn't going to happen, to not forget those who had come before, and what we might be able to do incrementally.

+. Hey, blogs are fanzines, basically. Sans martyred trees, mostly...

George Kelley got the books meme started in our little strand of the web, but Patti Abbott, as is her wont, put together the longest set of links to everyone's response she was aware of. K. A. Laity's link wasn't working on Patti's list when I checked, tho'.

And please spare a thought for Brian Arnold and his family, who faced a major loss this week.