Note: This is an updated version of an article that originally appeared on TCJ.com in 2012.
The legendary Harvey Kurtzman (1924-1993) needs no introduction, so here's one anyway. Harvey Kurtzman was a cartoonist, a writer, an editor and a publisher. He edited, wrote and created artwork and covers for EC’s groundbreaking war comics Two-Fisted Tales and Frontline Combat, and he was the creator of MAD, Trump, Humbug and HELP! Along with his long-time creative partner, cartoonist Will Elder, he spent 26 years producing the lushly painted comic strip Little Annie Fanny for Playboy magazine. The New York Times called Kurtzman “One of the most important figures in postwar America.” Harvey Kurtzman’s 100th birthday falls on Oct. 3.
Beginning in 1973, Harvey Kurtzman became a cartooning instructor at the School of Visual Arts (SVA) on East 23rd Street in New York City, which is where I would eventually meet him. In fact, the main reason I chose SVA as my art school was because Harvey Kurtzman was listed as an instructor in their catalog. Growing up as the middle son of a renowned author, Bruce Jay Friedman, meeting various writers, artists and performers was fairly common, but I always held cartoonists on a higher level. The fact that my dad actually worked as a magazine editor for a decade in the office right next to Stan Lee’s, and was friends with comic book artist Al Hollingsworth, children’s book illustrator Maurice Sendak and cartoonist Jules Feiffer, (author of the essential The Great Comic Book Heroes) was incredible to me, since my goal from an early age was to become a professional cartoonist and I was already striving to learn my comics history. Attending a 1971 Playboy writers convention in the early seventies, my dad posed for a group photo taken by Alfred Eisenstadt along with about a hundred other distinguished Playboy writers and artists. Publisher Hugh Hefner was prominently center stage, with his contributors posed around him. When I first saw the photo published in Playboy (I was twelve), what impressed me most was that my dad was standing right next to one of my idols … none other than Harvey Kurtzman! I don’t even know if they spoke to each other but it was still a huge point of pride for me.
As a young teenager in the early seventies, I attended many comic book conventions in NYC where Harvey Kurtzman was a sometimes guest, but I never dared approach him, afraid he'd dismiss me as just another annoying fanboy. As Kurtzman’s friend, cartoonist Arnold Roth has noted, walking into a comic convention with Harvey Kurtzman was like entering the Basilica alongside Jesus Christ. A couple of years later, noticing Kurtzman’s name listed in the SVA catalog simply as a cartoon instructor, I did a double-take, thinking this can’t be real, but there it was in black and white. I instantly applied to become a student at SVA. That would finally grant me access into Harvey Kurtzman’s world … or so I hoped.
I signed up for Kurtzman's course in my sophomore year at SVA in the fall of 1978 (freshmen couldn’t take “elective” classes, which Kurtzman’s was). At that time SVA had a Mount Rushmore of cartooning teachers: Kurtzman, Will Eisner and Art Spiegelman. At the beginning of the initial class, Harvey made it known that the objective of his class was to collect all of the best cartoons created during the year by the students, chosen by vote, into the annual class magazine Kar-Tunz. He also brought in a large pile of recent, mostly European, comics publications (nothing from Marvel or DC), and asked the class to sift through everything. At one point he slowly circled the room, asking each student to confess to the class who their favorite cartoonist was (Don Martin won out, I chose R. Crumb, a close second). When the class was ending, I was determined to get Harvey’s attention, so I made my approach. He was sitting at his desk doing some class paperwork and I leaned in and awkwardly announced "You know my father.” He lowered his reading glasses, looked up at me with weary eyes “… Oh yeah … who's your father?" I answered "Bruce Jay Friedman”. Seemingly unimpressed he murmured, "Oh, the writer”, and returned to his paperwork. But he quietly did take note, and with a wry smile would occasionally point me out to visiting class guests “and here we have the son of Bruce Jay Friedman.”
Harvey has been criticized by some of his ex-students for not being a great teacher because he was perhaps a bit too lackadaisical, but not by me. It wasn't really important that he be a great teacher -- just being in his presence for three hours a week was enough. For some reason, Harvey chose to focus mainly on creating gag cartoons, preparing his students for a career as, say, a New Yorker, National lampoon or Playboy one-panel gag cartoonist (at the time he was the cartoon editor at Esquire). Rarely did he bring up the subject of his comics work, but if a student or guest ever did, particularly referring to his early MAD or EC war comics, he clearly took pride that anyone was still interested in that work. But most of his students just thought of him as their amiable, well-liked cartoon instructor Mr. Kurtzman, some perhaps knowing he had some vague, one-time connection to MAD magazine and that he wrote that sexy color comic strip in the back of Playboy.
During one of Gary Groth's extensive interviews with Kurtzman for TCJ, he asked Harvey about teaching at SVA and what the students were like. "They don't know nuthin'!" was Harvey's dismissive reply, which was basically true. But to me and a few others in the class, among them future comics editor Mike Carlin, future Annie Fanny letterer Phil Felix, and cartoonists Mark Newgarden and Kaz, he was the turtle-faced, Yoda-like, living-legend in our midst, and once a week for three hours, his class was our ground zero, the main meeting place for like-minded aspiring cartoonists, humorists and wise guys, plus you never knew who might drop in. A steady stream of guest cartoonists would show up at Kurtzman’s class at any given time, announced or unannounced, among them Robert Grossman, Rick Meyerowitz, Neal Adams, Jack Ziegler, et al. The first time I ever encountered Robert Crumb was when he appeared at Kurtzman’s classroom door out of the blue (he was visiting NYC to buy old 78 records). Just as I had avoided approaching Kurtzman at the comic cons, I didn't dare approach Crumb.
Harvey encouraged chaos in his class. The first day of his course he'd hand out balloons and ask everyone to blow them up until they exploded, simulating the surprise you should get from a cartoon punchline, leading to inevitable class laughter. In the past I've sarcastically referred to SVA as The 13th Grade or (speaking of balloons) Clown College. As far as the classroom insanity, Harvey usually enjoyed and encouraged the Stooge noises and the endless classroom chaos and hi-jinx, often instigated by me. He once privately took me aside during a class to thank me for always helping to keep things so lively. But Harvey could also be very sensitive and fragile, and sometimes prone to tears, especially at that point in his life (he was in his mid-fifties when I took his class for three consecutive years), when things perhaps hadn't worked out as planned, and Little Annie Fanny was his main bread and butter. Some days he'd arrive at class and seemed fatigued, clearly not in the mood for the mayhem that would surely ensue. One of my friends and a fellow student at the time was Nando Pelusi, who would go on to become an editor and columnist for Psychology Today. Bill Shelley interviewed Nando for his biography of Kurtzman and he reminisced that he thought Harvey’s classroom body language indicated to him that he was a man who did not want to be there. That conflicts with Harvey’s Annie Fanny letterer Phil Felix who would work along side Kurtzman for 10 years after he was a student. Phil once told me that Harvey said he looked forward to the Tuesday SVA class more than anything else in his week. Go figure…
I'd like to think Harvey and I were on friendly terms, or at least as friendly as a student and teacher could be. I frequently joined him along with class guests and certain Kurtzman-chosen students, among them, at various times, Mark Newgarden, Dave Dubnanski, John Mariano, Chris Boyle, Arthur Ackerman, Phil Felix and Mike Carlin, at the after-class get togethers at the local Irish bar, The Glocca Morra, around the corner from SVA on Third Avenue. Harvey would slowly unwind, sip beer, and reminisce about Bill Gaines and his days at EC, his continuing dislike of Al Feldstein, Will Elder's wild practical jokes, his admiration for R. Crumb, his theories about the coke bottle design, current politics (at the time he admired Ronald Reagan) and his assistants at HELP!, Terry Gilliam and Gloria Steinem.
Harvey famously had a knack for spotting and encouraging new talent. Aside from hiring Gilliam, He also published Crumb’s work very early on in HELP! I was proud that Harvey always seemed to get my work and appreciate what I was attempting to do, specifically the intense stipple detail I was putting into my comics (he once wrote that I was a much better cartoonist than Georges Seurat). He seemed to take pride in the fact that after I graduated, my work was getting attention and being published in RAW, Weirdo, Heavy Metal, National Lampoon and Spy. One of his later students told me that Harvey would bring in samples of my work to pridefully show his students. He even wrote a foreword for my first anthology.
After SVA and my move away from New York, I only ran into him a few more times, including as he was just beginning to get ill. One summer he called me out of the blue and asked me to keep it under my hat, but would I like to edit a new humor magazine that he would publish. I was honored by the offer and enthusiastically replied “Yes!”… which is when he earned one of his nicknames, Harvey the Vague. That's the last I ever heard about editing a humor magazine for him.
Harvey died in 1993 after suffering for several years from the ravages of Parkinson's disease, but his legacy has by no means diminished, in fact it continues to grow. Several biographies have been written about him, The Society of Illustrators held a huge retrospective of his work in 2013, and no less than two Kurtzman film documentaries have been announced. A few years back, along with Gary Groth, I interviewed Jack Davis at the Brooklyn Comics Festival. Davis continually credited Harvey Kurtzman as the single best editor he ever worked for, giving Kurtzman full credit for pushing him into artistic directions that would eventually make him one of the top humor illustrators of his time.
It was after our talk with Davis that I was inspired to create this portrait (based on a mid-seventies photo by E. B. Boatner) of Harvey Kurtzman, posed in his cramped attic studio at his home in Mount Vernon, NY. The portrait of Harvey was the second image I created (Will Elder was the first) for my eventual book Heroes of the Comics (Fantagraphics, 2014).
I also drew a full page portrait of Harvey for my book Maverix & Lunatix: Icons of Underground Comix (Fantagraphics, 2022). The book was also dedicated to him. Harvey Kurtzman was a mentor to a generation of cartoonists who would make their initial mark in underground comix, among them R. Crumb, Jay Lynch, Gilbert Shelton, Joel Beck and Art Spiegelman. In fact, he’s been hailed as the father of the underground comix movement. His response: “I demand a blood test!”
Happy centennial Harvey!
Drew Friedman’s latest book is Schtick Figures (Fantagraphics). Heis the subject of the new documentary Vermeer of the Borscht Belt, directed by Kevin Dougherty.
The post Harvey Kurtzman: Seriously Funny appeared first on The Comics Journal.
Hello, my name is Jack Sparrow. I'm a 50 year old self-employed Pirate from the Caribbean.
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