A Kurtzman is Hard to Find

Harvey's Higher Aspirations

What’s frustrating about the Gex X condition is having been programmed since childhood to crave a steady diet of pop culture, yet being told consistently that, as a post-boom generation, you were born too late for the best of it. You missed Ginsberg debuting Howl; you missed the Friedan and Kinsey scandals; you missed Lenny Bruce, Weird-Ohs, the Ford Falcon, and Amazing Fantasy 15.

And, as any pin-pupiled, mud-caked lovemaker at Woodstock could tell you, you missed EC Comics. Truthfully, most of those Aquarians had missed it too, the EC Comics enterprise having been excommunicated and stricken from the record before most of them had seen their gloriously gory output. Everyone claimed to have read every issue of Tales from the Crypt and Weird Science fresh off the rack, but EC’s prime had come and gone while they were still chewing on their Little Lulus.

I was born too late for EC, but the legend loomed large. Those high-quality publications, full of top-drawer cartooning, rich in gruesome horror and moralizing irony, cut down in their prime by crusading censors bent on squelching America’s much-needed juvenile delinquency and buried alive like a cheating spouse with a double indemnity policy. I knew the story, and its bone-chilling effects on the culture very well.

But what I knew best was MAD, the one EC production to survive the comics code Kristallnacht, which thrived in its kiddified-yet-still-subversive form throughout my childhood. As an instructional pamphlet for der Kinder, intent on deprogramming Dick and Jane from the Big Lie of god, country, and Coca-Cola, MAD inspired Boy Scouts across the nation to throw down their neckerchiefs and embrace nonconformity. But it was also clear that MAD, as the loudest voice of anti-authoritarianism for kids, was simultaneously a product of that same authority. It was the most mainstream of counter-culture products, promoted by the usual assortment of board games, boxer shorts, and Broadway reboots that keep the capitalist Titanic afloat. The medium is the mixed message.

By that time, MAD had all but erased the memory of its founder, Harvey Kurtzman, a giant on the Mount Olympus of comic book creatives, perhaps best remembered today for having made one of the worst career decisions in history. Kurtzman, having utilized his stellar wit and satirical precision to launch one the few true blockbusters of the comic book trade, demanded controlling interest in the magazine or he’d walk. He walked, MAD flourished, and Harvey tried and failed to make lightning strike twice for the rest of his life.

Kurtzman, you see, thought the grass was greener in the “slicks,” the mainstream newsstand publications. He believed his notoriety as a critic of establishment culture would carpet his entry into that establishment. Harvey wanted the big-ticket advertisements of Madison Avenue in MAD. He wanted his song of satire to harmonize with the jingles of commercial culture; he wanted to enjoy the riches of those he ostensibly condemned. He tried to achieve this elsewhere with Trump, Humbug, and Help, each magazine full of lavishly illustrated parodies, each full of cutting humor, and each dying an untimely death. By the time I knew who Harvey Kurtzman was, he’d been writing the execrable “Little Annie Fanny” for Playboy for over a decade, and I had no clue he had any connection to MAD.

But far be it for me to chastise anyone’s bad luck in business. From this fanboy’s perspective, the tragedy isn’t Kurtzman’s barren bank account but the “what could have been” of his creative output. For one thing, I think the superior production of his stint at EC wasn’t MAD, but his war books, Two-Fisted Tales and Frontline Combat. In the grand scheme of cultural influence, I believe Harvey’s hard-hitting war comics – which were really anti-war comics – contain, in all their melodrama, a much more vital message for youngsters than his ridiculing the plot holes of Dragnet in MAD.

Beyond that, where Kurtzman truly excelled was as a bona fide, brush-on-the-page cartoonist. Personally, I have little interest in H.K. productions where the man himself didn’t illustrate the stories, the glories of Davis, Wood, and Severin notwithstanding. But aside from a brief stint freelancing in the late ‘50s and a few random illustrations here and there, Kurtzman avoided actual drawing throughout his later career, leaving the task to those artists he thought more commercial. Had he abandoned his wannabe-Heffner aspirations, and realized that he was born a cartoonist and not a media mogul*, he would likely have starved with the rest of us ink-slinging grunts, but good lord (choke), what stunning work he would have produced.

But that’s just me talking, a guy born too late to have experienced the young Kurtzman, brimming with potential, knowing only the fading legend via an obnoxious Seventies Playboy feature. Meanwhile, MAD, that other artifact of post-war neurosis, remained robotically iconoclastic for a few decades, thanks to EC publisher Bill Gaines’ stubborn refusal to play nice with the straights (he nursed a bit of a grudge against the powers that be for some reason), but was immediately consumed by the suits upon Gaines’ death, stuffed with ads, and eventually drained of whatever profit was left in the brand name after the magazine itself was canceled. The same thing happened to Playboy, Vanity Fair, Esquire, and all the other slick mags whose ranks Kurtzman had aspired to join.

Those magazines had been zombie versions of their former selves when I was young, their million-selling glory days recalled rapturously by our wet-eyed elders. And you younger guys and gals were born too late even for that. In today’s online culture, where our every move is commodified by advertisers and individuals brand themselves like designer handbags, it’s hard to say if Kurtzman’s MAD message still means anything. Could be our only recourse is to join the corporate culture we can’t beat like Harvey tried to do.

But at least we can use the internet to read back issues of Frontline Combat.

-A.H.

* Kurtzman actually aspired to work in – shudder! – television!