Harvey’s Hundredth

Cartoonist Harvey Kurtzman was born 100 years ago today – on October 3, 1924.

From the editors of The Comics Journal:

This Thursday, Oct. 3, marks the 100th birthday of Harvey Kurtzman, the genius behind Two-Fisted Tales, Frontline Combat, Mad, Trump, Humbug, Help! and, yes, even Little Annie Fanny.

Kurtzman’s work changed the shape of American humor with his take on the truth. Advertising is lying to you, Hollywood is lying to you, the government is definitely lying to you- but if you find out what’s not true, therein lies the joke.

To properly honor his centennial, we at The Comics Journal thought it would be a good idea to dedicate the week to examining his work. Thus, apart from the odd review, we’ll be running a number of essays, interviews and articles all about Kurtzman, including:

• An in-depth look at his early sci-fi stories for EC
• An examination of his influence on comics journalism
• An unpublished interview with him on the comics crackdown of the 1950s
• Remembrances from those who had Kurtzman for a teacher
• And much, much more

We’re kicking things off today with a lovely appreciation of Kurtzman’s Hey Look! by Paul Karasik, along with a plethora of classic Hey Look! strips.

Paul Karasik’s appreciation of Kurtzman’s one page comic book strips of 1946-49 (and there many more samles of the 150 pages at Animation Resources and The Fabulous Fifties) leads us into a brief look at the Harvey Kurtzman newspaper comic strips. Necessarily brief because he didn’t do much in the field.

Hey Look! was a direct ancestor of Harvey’s only solo newspaper comic strip Silver Linings.

From Allan Holtz:

Silver Linings was by Harvey Kurtzman, for my money one of the greatest cartoonists of the past century. The vast bulk of his work was in comic books, of course — he was the father of Mad magazine, a guiding force behind the EC war comics, and produced arguably one of the most innovative series ever to appear between the covers of a comic book, the one-pager Hey, Look series that ran in the humor titles of Timely Comics in the 1940s.

Silver Linings is essentially a compacted version of Hey, Look. It shares that wild minimalist art style and constantly breaks the so-called fourth wall as in the second sample reproduced here.

Kurtzman produced the series for the Herald-Tribune from March 7 through June 20 1948. In that period the filler strip had nine appearances.

Six of the nine Silver Linings can be read at Comicrazys, all of them can be seen in b&w at The Fabulous Fifties.

In 1951 King Features contracted with Dan Barry to revive the Flash Gordon comic strip and Barry enlisted a number of comic book cartoonists to help bring the effort to newspapers in November 1951. Among them was Harvey Kurtzman who started supplying scripts and very rough layouts for the April 1952 dailies.

Kurtzman’s Flash Gordon lasted a year from April 1952 until April 1953 by which time he left Barry over differences on the strip and his increasing workload with the MAD comic book that Harvey had started during that year.

And that was Harvey’s career as a newspaper comic strip creator.

Oh, he did try other strips like a reworked Pot-Shot Pete but the syndicates didn’t bite. To quote Allan Holtz:

It has to be considered a tribute to the myopia of the comics editor[s] … who could be so clueless as to not sign Kurtzman for a regular comic strip series …

And very early while serving during WWII Kurtzman contributed to the Camp Sutton newspaper.