THE ART OF… HARVEY KURTZMAN

Have you ever wondered who’s behind some of the most important influences in modern graphic humor? From Saturday Night Live to The Simpsons, there’s an undercurrent of irreverent comedy that can be traced back to a single man: Harvey Kurtzman, the undisputed genius who revolutionized not only comics, but the world of humor in its entirety.

The comics and magazines he produced for Bill Gaines and his EC Comics during the 1950s marked indelible milestones in popular culture. His influence is such that the entire underground comix movement recognized its genesis in the pages of Mad. What made Kurtzman such a revolutionary figure wasn’t just his ability to make people laugh and think, but the care, dedication, and sacrifice he devoted to creating the best possible comics throughout his life. This commitment to excellence makes him an inspiring example for any artist looking to master the art of comic drawing and elevate it to another level.

Get ready to discover the original madman… Harvey Kurtzman!

The Beginnings: From the Streets of Brooklyn to the Art World

Harvey Kurtzman was born on October 3, 1924, in Brooklyn, New York, the son of Jewish Ukrainian immigrants who had fled to America escaping religious persecution. His childhood was marked by adversity: his father died of an ulcer when Harvey was just 4 years old, and the economic hardships that followed were so severe that his mother was forced to place him in an orphanage for three months, until she found work as a milliner and married a Russian immigrant connected to the printers’ union.

From an early age, Kurtzman showed a passionate interest in art, especially comics. This passion led him to check the garbage cans of his building on Monday mornings, looking for the widest possible variety of Sunday comic strips, since his parents subscribed to the Daily Worker, whose comics selection left much to be desired. Growing up during the Great Depression, in a decade when continuity strips reached enormous popularity while comic books were beginning to emerge, Kurtzman absorbed influences from popular strips like V.T. Hamelin’s Alley Oop, Chester Gould’s Dick Tracy, Al Capp’s Li’l Abner, among many others.

His first artistic works were strips drawn with chalk on sidewalks, which he called Ikey and Mikey, referencing Rube Goldberg’s Mike and Ike. Later, when comic books became the new trend in the medium, he recognized in Will Eisner and his The Spirit a pinnacle of the genre, being strongly influenced by its film noir style.

Both his mother and stepfather actively encouraged his artistic vocation, taking him to museums and drawing classes on weekends. Through his stepfather, he was able to visit printing workshops and presses, where he collaborated in different stages of design and drawing. His precocious talent distinguished him during adolescence, allowing him to skip a grade in high school. At 14, he won a drawing contest and saw his work published for the first time in Tip Top Comics #36, in April 1939. That same year he won the annual John Wanamaker art prize, which provided him with a scholarship to study at the prestigious High School of Music and Arts in Harlem.

This educational institution not only provided him with formal training in the technical aspects of drawing and illustration, but also allowed him to interact with other young artists who shared his passion for comics, and who would later become colleagues and collaborators in Mad, such as Al Jaffee, John Severin and, especially, Will Elder, who would become his humorous soulmate.

From Soldier to Innovator: The Formative Years

Kurtzman graduated from high school in 1941 and continued his artistic training with a scholarship to Cooper Union. However, he abandoned these studies after a year to devote himself completely to creating comics. While trying to establish himself professionally, he did various temporary jobs in Manhattan and tirelessly visited offices with his portfolio until he managed to become an assistant to Lou Ferstadt, who produced comics for different publishers while drawing a strip for the Daily Worker.

During this time, Kurtzman produced material that, although not particularly outstanding, allowed him to gain experience. He supplemented his income by designing crossword puzzles for Martin Goodman’s various publications until he was drafted for military service in 1943. Although World War II was at its peak and Kurtzman received infantry training, he was never sent to the front, dedicating his time to creating posters and illustrations for the army.

During this period, editor and artist L.B. Cole invited him to write and draw the Black Venus series for Orbit Publications, adding to this various works published in local magazines at the bases where he was stationed. Although he still didn’t stand out among his contemporaries, the constant flow of work combined with his refined graphic instinct allowed him to perfect his artistic vision and define the first outlines of his exceptional narrative style.

At the end of the war, Kurtzman returned to New York, finding a radically transformed comics market. The sector was saturated with all the artists returning from military service in Europe and Asia, and the old packager studio system had been replaced by freelance commissions. In 1947, Kurtzman joined Elder to found a studio. Although this initiative allowed him to establish artistically and personally valuable contacts, such as future French writer René Goscinny, the venture proved unprofitable for all involved, something Kurtzman attributed to his confessed poor business sense.

During this stage, Kurtzman subsisted mainly on his crossword puzzles for Goodman, until a chance encounter with Stan Lee, Goodman’s nephew and editor of his comic line, changed his professional course. Lee examined his portfolio and offered him the opportunity to create one-page comics as filler material for Timely Comics’ various comic books, Goodman’s publishing branch that would eventually transform into Atlas and finally into Marvel Comics.

Hey Look!: The Birth of a Revolutionary Style

These single-sheet humor pages, which Lee simply named Hey Look!, represented the first clear manifestation of Kurtzman’s comic talent. Starting with simple and absurd characters, a dynamic and explosive style, and an exceptional sense of composition and comic timing that was refined page after page, Hey Look! showed that Kurtzman was investing a level of dedication rarely seen in the comic book industry.

The pursuit of absolute clarity in composition and the use of abstraction pushed to the limit in Hey Look!, combined with Kurtzman’s original humor, which frequently incorporated metatextual elements in his jokes, anticipated his future role as a master of the medium, obsessed with provoking laughter in the most effective and satisfying way possible.

Although Hey Look! wasn’t particularly popular with readers, Kurtzman had a key admirer in the Timely offices: a young secretary named Adele, whom he had met at an M&A alumni meeting, and with whom he quickly established a relationship that would culminate in marriage and three children. The future Mrs. Kurtzman, convinced of her dear Harvey’s talent, manipulated the responses to a popularity survey to make it appear that readers loved his work. A surprised Lee assigned more humor comics to Kurtzman, who continued to refine his humorous approach focusing on parody and the absurd.

This pioneering work in the search for a unique visual language for graphic humor laid the groundwork for what would later become his visual narrative techniques that would revolutionize sequential art, techniques that any aspiring illustrator should study thoroughly.

EC Comics: The Meeting with Bill Gaines

However, in 1949 Goodman decided to dispense with fillers in his comics, leaving Kurtzman once again in search of work. That’s how he arrived at the offices at 225 Lafayette St., mistakenly believing they belonged to legendary Max Gaines’ educational comics publishing label. He was unaware that Max had died and that his son Bill, upon inheriting the company, had decided to change the E in Educational to E for Entertainment, thus giving birth to the legendary EC Comics.

Although initially they had no work to offer him, Gaines and his editor and collaborator Al Feldstein spent hours laughing with Hey Look!, and got him a commission to draw “Lucky Fights It Through,” an educational western with a musical interlude that sought to warn the public about the dangers of syphilis. By the time Kurtzman completed this peculiar job, Gaines and Feldstein were already completely dedicated to their brand new “New Trend” of horror, crime, and science fiction comics, which stood out for their irreverent stories and the exceptional talent of their artists.

While creating children’s books with Goscinny, scripts for the daily Flash Gordon strip drawn by Dan Barry, and various cartoons and jokes for college humor magazines, Kurtzman contributed some stories for Weird Science, Vault of Horror, and other EC magazines, and soon began writing his own material.

However, Kurtzman never felt comfortable with the sadism and morbidity of horror comics. In an attempt to produce material more in line with his tastes, he convinced Gaines to publish a new adventure comic book, in the tradition of classic pulps and Roy Crane’s Captain Easy. Gaines liked the idea, and Two-Fisted Tales went on sale in the fall of 1950. It soon became clear that neither Gaines nor Feldstein had a predisposition for the type of action and exoticism that the genre required, and by the end of the year Kurtzman was not only the artist, writer, and cover artist for the comic, but also the editor, assuming this role for the first (but not last) time in his career.

War and Realism: The Evolution of a Visual Master

The tone of Two-Fisted Tales changed radically after its first issues, abandoning escapist adventure for a much cruder reflection of reality. In June 1950, in distant Korea, communist troops from the north, supported by China and the USSR, invaded the south of the peninsula, initiating what in the West is known as the Korean War. The newly formed United Nations approved a “police action” to protect the integrity of South Korea, and by 1951 it was evident that, after just five years of peace, the United States was again at war.

The tragic conflict revived public interest in military action, and war comics in particular experienced an increase in sales. Gaines encouraged Kurtzman to change his focus and added a new magazine, Frontline Combat, under his direction. The change of genre, combined with the creative freedom that Gaines granted him, motivated Kurtzman to produce comics of unprecedented narrative quality in the medium until then.

His search for perfect compositions led to an increasingly elaborate process, whereby each page, strip, and panel could be redesigned or rewritten as many times as necessary until he was satisfied with the overall layout of the story, all this before placing the pencil on the paper! Starting from an image or a basic idea, Kurtzman took all the graphic resources he had experimented with to get laughs in Hey Look! and applied them in search of drama and realism, creating agile and explosive page designs that raise the standard of what is possible in comics to this day.

This meticulous methodology and his innovative vision of graphic narrative are aspects that every contemporary illustrator should study. Explore here the fundamentals of visual storytelling that made Kurtzman an undisputed master and discover how you can apply these principles in your own creations.

However, despite his art reaching an extremely attractive graphic level, with thick brushstrokes and expressive anatomy, Kurtzman gradually transformed into what he himself called a “backstage caricaturist.” This was partly due to his commitment to his true vision as editor and lead writer of Two-Fisted Tales and Frontline Combat.

The average war comics of the Golden Age were mostly patriotic and heroic tales, showing American soldiers as brave warriors of justice and enemies (almost always Asian) as savage and sadistic brutes. War was generally presented almost as a fun and exotic adventure, where good always triumphed over evil. Even without having been on the front lines, Kurtzman knew enough about armed conflicts to understand that selling that representation of war to children was almost an obscenity. Therefore, he sought to make his magazines a voice of truth in an ocean of lies, while still creating entertaining comics for pre-teens in search of adventure and exoticism, but in a much more sober way than the competition.

The Obsession with Detail: An Unwavering Commitment to Truth

A fundamental element of this approach was a meticulous dedication to realism. Kurtzman could spend weeks or even months researching in libraries, embassies, military hospitals, and any other necessary source to ensure that even the smallest detail in his comics was historically accurate. This research also led to numerous stories based on historical war conflicts, such as the American Civil War or the Napoleonic campaigns, conveying the message that the problem wasn’t specifically the war in Korea, but the very nature of war, which has led humanity to massacre each other in the most absurd ways since the dawn of history.

This commitment to meticulous research, combined with Kurtzman’s elaborate creative process, resulted in him taking considerably longer to produce a script than was usual in the industry.

The situation was further complicated because, if Kurtzman was demanding with himself as a writer, he was no less so as an editor. Unlike Feldstein, who left the composition of stories to the discretion of his artists, Kurtzman expected his artists to follow his compositions to the letter, and for all clothing, weapons, vehicles, and other elements to be exact down to the last detail. This involved constant revisions and sometimes disputes with the artists.

Kurtzman’s need to create comics that faithfully reflected the vision he had in his mind led to the process of personally drawing becoming economically unviable for him. Although he continued to design covers for his magazines, he concentrated his energies on conveying his stories to artists who could tolerate working under such strict conditions and still produce quality pages.

Most of the stories in Two-Fisted Tales and Frontline Combat were drawn by a select group of regular EC artists, considered among the best active artists of the time: Jack Davis, Wally Wood, John Severin, and his old friend Will Elder. This group would constitute the founding core with which Kurtzman would create one of the most important comic books in the history of the medium.

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Mad: The Humor Revolution That Changed American Culture

By 1952, Kurtzman was at a creative peak, but felt frustrated with his work situation at EC. The dedication and meticulousness of his editorial style meant that each comic took him a month to edit, while his colleague Feldstein could have a complete issue of Tales from the Crypt ready in a week. The difference between the 2 titles edited by Kurtzman versus Feldstein’s 7 (among which were the horror bestsellers) represented a significant salary disparity.

To appease him, Gaines proposed adding a new magazine to his repertoire and, remembering Hey Look!, suggested that a humor comic should be easier for Kurtzman to edit given his affinity for the genre. Kurtzman got to work, and in August 1952 the first issue of Mad was published. A year later, it had become EC’s best-selling comic by a wide margin.

Mad represents a turning point in the history of American comedy. Inspired by the great Al Capp, whose strip Li’l Abner was the most famous satire in the country at that time, Kurtzman based the humor of the first issues of Mad on parodies of the most popular comics, movies, and television series of the time. He changed their names to atrocious puns, portrayed their stars as imbeciles, and exposed all the clichés, prejudices, and commonplaces that characterized popular culture of the moment.

In addition to the revolutionary content for the conservative climate of the time, Mad comics were illustrated by the best humor artists available. Davis, Wood, and Elder were the main collaborators at this stage, and the work they did in Mad is considered among the best of their extensive careers.

Kurtzman’s keen perception for mocking the absurdity of American society, combined with his crystalline compositions, merged with the particular styles and senses of humor of his artists. Although they had to follow Kurtzman’s diagrams down to the last detail, they were free to incorporate as many additional jokes on the page as they could, following an approach that Will Elder called “chicken fat,” referring to the part of soup that doesn’t provide nutrients but gives it its characteristic flavor. The result was a phenomenon that broke all established conventions about what a good humorous comic book for children should be.

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The Transformation of Mad and the Comics Code: Navigating Censorship

Mad made Kurtzman one of the most respected comic artists in the medium, but he didn’t settle for resting on his laurels for even a moment. He constantly experimented with the limits of the comic book format, seeking to ensure his humor didn’t end up depending on the same vague clichés he criticized. However, he still felt dissatisfied with what he could achieve within those limitations and, after several negotiations, convinced Gaines to take a radical step: starting with issue 24 (June 1955), Mad was transformed into a magazine format.

This new version of Mad was produced with all the characteristics of a conventional magazine, but distorted by the deranged vision of Kurtzman and his team, to which he added writers like Ernie Kovacs and Steve Allen, and artists like Al Jaffee. The format change not only further boosted Mad’s popularity (the first issue of the new stage had to be reprinted, something almost unheard of for a magazine), but it turned out to be a blessing in disguise for Gaines.

The horror and suspense comics that had previously been EC’s economic mainstay had aroused the indignation of self-proclaimed guardians of public morality. These critics maintained that the grotesque art and irreverent plots of these publications fostered disobedience, ignorance, and juvenile delinquency among the millions of American children who read comics daily.

After years of media and legal attacks against comic books (including a Senate investigation that summoned Gaines to testify, with disastrous results), the industry, distributors, and retailers agreed to self-regulate. In 1955, the Comics Code Authority was created, an organization responsible for reviewing, censoring, and approving all comic books sold at newsstands.

The Comics Code imposed creative restrictions on the entire medium for decades, and the comic book market suffered a catastrophic collapse. In this context, Gaines showed himself willing to abandon the publication of comic books and focus exclusively on Mad, which thanks to its new format was beyond the reach of censorship.

After Mad’s Success: The Relentless Pursuit of Perfection

Despite the success, Kurtzman remained dissatisfied. The magazine format had provided him with more pages to apply his genius, but the production values continued to be very austere. During the early years, Mad contributors received just $25 per article. Simultaneously, his editorial perfectionism reached a critical point, and he began to miss his deadlines, causing Mad to be published irregularly, to Gaines’ frustration.

In this context, Kurtzman had a crucial meeting with a frustrated cartoonist who had found success from the other side of the publishing business: Hugh Hefner, founder of Playboy magazine, which since its launch in 1952 had become a cultural phenomenon by bringing eroticism to the forefront in puritanical American society.

Hefner, knowledgeable about the medium and a staunch admirer of Kurtzman, assured him that he had a place for him in his flourishing empire if he so desired. Tempted by the offer, Kurtzman had a final dispute with Gaines over control of Mad, and in July 1956 he left the magazine, taking with him Elder, Davis, Jaffee, and his production assistant Harry Chester.

With the addition of artist Arthur Roth, this group constituted the core for Trump, a full-color magazine on glossy paper, aimed at Playboy’s adult and sophisticated audience. Kurtzman would later claim that it was the closest thing to a perfect satirical magazine he produced in his career. However, the dream ended abruptly when Hefner’s empire faced a financial crisis in early 1957, forcing him to cut expenses. Kurtzman had invested $100,000 in the first issue alone, and despite promising sales, Trump was canceled after only two editions, marking the first in a series of commercial failures that would tragically characterize the rest of his career.

Humbug and the Challenges of Self-Publishing

After the collapse of Trump, Kurtzman met with his collaborators to assess the situation. What began as a session of laments (accompanied by a bottle of whiskey courtesy of Roth) transformed into enthusiasm. Kurtzman knew they were capable of producing a great magazine if someone gave them the chance to publish it, but the wound from Trump was too recent to depend on a publisher again.

Finally, a radical idea emerged: publish it themselves, contributing their respective savings and working without remuneration until the magazine generated profits, which would then be distributed equally. This business model had never been attempted before in the world of American magazines.

With Kurtzman leading creatively, and using office spaces on Madison Avenue provided by a remorseful Hefner, the first issue of Humbug went on sale in June 1957. Although the budgetary limitations contrasted radically with Trump (Humbug had a comic book format and was printed in two colors on low-quality paper), Kurtzman and his team enjoyed a revitalizing creative freedom.

The publication aimed at a more adult audience than Mad but more intellectual than Trump, with greater emphasis on political satire and the sophisticated but youthful humor typical of university magazines. Despite having a group of die-hard followers from the beginning, and even getting Ballantine Books to publish a book format edition, Humbug proved too unconventional to survive in the still fragile publishing market, and closed after 11 issues.

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Jungle Book: The Last Integral Masterpiece

Economically ruined and emotionally devastated after so many setbacks, Kurtzman returned to freelance work, selling jokes to magazines while trying to relaunch his career as a comic artist, with little success.

In that context, Ballantine Books approached him with an interesting proposal. The reprints of Mad in paperback format had been a very lucrative business for the publisher, but Gaines had recently signed with another label, leaving Ballantine in search of a new successful product. Considering that Kurtzman had been the mastermind behind the content of those books, it was worth trying to see if the success could be repeated.

A paperback with original comics for adults had never been attempted before, which represented an ideal project for Kurtzman’s innovative mindset. The result, “Harvey Kurtzman’s Jungle Book,” was the last great comic he produced as an integral creator, constituting a fascinating culmination of his golden decade.

Abandoning the thick brushstrokes and strong contrasts that had characterized him, Jungle Book presents a looser and more fluid inking, almost sketchy, which gives his characters even greater expressiveness. The composition, on the other hand, maintains the impeccable quality of always, and Kurtzman took advantage of the format to write more extensive and elaborate satires, where his sense of humor and his ability to point out hypocrisy and social stupidity reach new heights of sophistication.

Although Jungle Book represented another financial disappointment for Kurtzman, the community of faithful followers of his work agreed that it was another indisputable masterpiece.

Help! and the Playboy Years: Final Creative Adventures

Kurtzman’s last editorial project was the most economical, and perhaps for that reason, the longest-lasting. Help! was published for 26 issues over 5 years, under the label of James Warren, responsible for the popular horror magazine Famous Monsters of Filmland. With a production barely superior to Humbug, Help! was composed mainly of ‘fumetti,’ photographic comics where Kurtzman’s compositions were interpreted by actors instead of being drawn, a curious and considerably economical method.

Despite (or perhaps thanks to) these limitations, Help! became a vital seedbed of satirical talent. Attracted by Kurtzman’s legendary status, an entire generation of writers, actors, and artists who had been shaped by the parodic insanity of Mad contributed both with articles and drawings as well as lending their image to star in Kurtzman’s ‘fumetti.’ Among them stand out feminist writer Gloria Steinem, future Monty Python members John Cleese and Terry Gilliam, and fundamental figures of underground comics like Gilbert Shelton and R. Crumb.

His old friend Will Elder also participated, with whom he revived a character from Jungle Book, the eternally naive Goodman Beaver, in some of the wildest satires of his career. Among them is “Goodman Goes Playboy!”, where he mocked not only the insipid Archie comics, but also his former boss Hugh Hefner.

Archie Comics didn’t appreciate the joke and sued Warren, but Hefner found it quite funny. As the Playboy empire had already recovered economically, Hefner approached Kurtzman again with a more modest proposal: create a strip similar to Goodman Beaver for the pages of Playboy, but replacing Goodman with a dazzling but equally naive blonde.

Together with Elder, Kurtzman created Little Annie Fanny in 1962, a series that finally provided them with good remuneration and reproduction quality, and for which they produced pages in Playboy intermittently for 26 years. However, the erotic demands of the series (Annie had to be naked at least once per installment, and even clothed her physical attributes directed the reader’s attention) and Hefner’s humiliating editorial demands weighed heavily on Kurtzman. Although several adventures of Little Annie Fanny are genuinely funny, in general they don’t reach the level of his previous works.

Legacy and Late Recognition: The Great Master of Comics

Despite his artistic ambitions being ultimately limited by circumstances, Kurtzman continued to enjoy the respect and admiration of his colleagues for the rest of his life. During the 1970s and 1980s, he taught caricature classes at the School of Visual Arts in New York, encouraged by his old friend Will Eisner, and even annually edited an independent anthology of the school, Kar-tunz, so that his students could see their work published.

During his final years he received numerous tributes, being one of the first included in the Will Eisner Award Hall of Fame. A prize was even created in his honor, the Harvey Award, to recognize excellence in the field of comics. Unfortunately, amid all the recognition he had waited for throughout his life, Kurtzman’s health deteriorated rapidly due to Parkinson’s disease, and he died on February 21, 1993.

The Enduring Influence of a Genius

Harvey Kurtzman’s legacy is vast and multifaceted, offering countless lessons for those who wish to delve into his work. As an artist, his compositions and layouts constitute a masterclass in visual storytelling. As a writer, his sarcastic message of distrust towards hegemonic media is as relevant today as when it was originally published.

But perhaps the most inspiring aspect of Kurtzman was his unwavering dedication as an editor, both of his own work and that of others. If he demanded 100% from his artists, he demanded 110% from himself, and the results of this absolute commitment are still evident 70 years later, not only in the field of comics but in an entire society that has been shaped, in part, by his peculiar sense of humor.

Harvey Kurtzman’s story teaches us that true artistic greatness doesn’t simply arise from innate talent, but from a combination of vision, obsessive dedication to the craft, and the courage to challenge established conventions. His legacy endures as a beacon for all artists who seek to elevate their medium beyond perceived limits, reminding us that even in seemingly lighter genres, such as graphic humor, there exists the possibility of creating works of profound cultural and artistic impact.

For those who aspire to follow in the footsteps of this extraordinary creator, the path begins with the same commitment to excellence that defined every page he produced. Take the first step in your own artistic journey by discovering resources that will inspire you to reach new creative heights, just as Harvey Kurtzman did throughout his extraordinary career.