In 1974, Harvey Kurtzman, along with Will Eisner, began teaching weekly three-hour sessions every semester at the School of Visual Arts. You can learn how they came to be hired in my interview with John Holmstrom, a freshman at the time. And if you keep clicking around this site, you’ll also find Drew Friedman’s reminiscences of his days in Harvey’s class.
Here are just a few of the many others who went on to successful careers in comics and animation. These artists offer a kaleidoscope of perspectives on a tremendously significant but little known part of mid-century American comics’ most important artist-writer-editor.
After you read these interviews, if you’re looking to learn more more about Harvey’s SVA days – and hey, about his entire, fascinating life and career – then you should definitely pick up Bill Schelly’s excellent bio, Harvey Kurtzman: The Man who Created Mad and Revolutionized Humor in America, comprehensive at nearly 650 pages. You won’t be disappointed.
The participants
MARK NEWGARDEN: cartoonist and SVA instructor, currently teaching “How To Think in Words and Pictures” in the “Illustration as Visual Essay” MFA program and “About Comics” in the undergrad program.
TOM SITO: animator whose screen credits include Beauty and the Beast, The Little Mermaid, Aladdin, The Lion King, and Shrek; author of several books; animation historian, instructor at the University of Southern California.
MIKE CARLIN: cartoonist, writer, editor, executive editor and director of animation at Marvel and DC Comics for over 40 years; best known for orchestrating the famous “Death and Return of Superman” storyline.
BOB FINGERMAN: author, artist, creator of the comic series Minimum Wage and graphic novels From the Ashes, Recess Pieces, and Printopia; one of Mad magazine’s final “usual gang of idiots”.
DAN RIBA: Emmy-winning animation director known mostly for directing Batman: the Animated Series, Superman, and Justice League; Eisner Award winner for Batman Holiday Special, 1995.
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MICHAEL DOOLEY: What semesters did you spend with Harvey?
NEWGARDEN: I took Harvey’s class in my sophomore year at SVA, Fall 1979 and Spring 1980. I graduated SVA in 1982 as a “Media” – cartooning – major and spent the ensuing decades doing just that, under a bewildering variety of circumstances.
SITO: I took Harvey Kurtzman’s class in the Fall of 1974 through to 1975. You could take his class more than once, and many of us did. My last year I was Harvey’s SA: Student Assistant. Among other chores, he needed someone to go out for a beer with him before he caught the last commuter train to Mt. Vernon. He liked the Glocca- Morra Pub on Third Avenue and East 22 Street.
CARLIN: I think I had Harvey 1978-79 and again 1979-80.
FINGERMAN: Just for one semester, starting September 1983.
RIBA: I went to SVA from 1979-82 and sat in on Kurtzman's class several times.
What made you show up in his classroom?
NEWGARDEN: I enrolled at SVA to take Harvey’s class. I had quit high school early, got a GED and took continuing education classes at both The New School and SVA. One was an illustration class co-taught by R.O. Blechman and Charles Slackman. This course was geared to working illustrators trying to get a professional leg up and I was just this clueless kid from Staten Island. After a few weeks Blechman took me aside and diplomatically suggested that I enroll in the undergrad department as a full time student, go through foundation, and then take Harvey’s class. I did what I was told. I was already hopelessly in love with Harvey’s Mad. I didn’t need further convincing.
However, I am sorry I didn’t stick around that night class longer. Fellow students that semester included Peter Bagge and Ed Subitzky, both of whom I would later cross paths with.
SITO: I wanted to take any classes to do with cartooning and animation. I knew of his reputation because I was a big fan of Mad magazine. I gravitated to Harvey more than Will Eisner because I knew Will’s focus would be comic books, and I was hot to be an animator. In retrospect I wish I had taken Will because the lessons in his books I read since greatly helped my storyboarding.
CARLIN: I believed I was going to be a cartoonist/animator. And as a comic fan I was aware of both Harvey Kurtzman’s and Will Eisner's achievements, so I signed up for both of their classes.
FINGERMAN: Because he’s Harvey Kurtzman! Why else? The man who created Mad? One of my heroes? How could I not? He’s why I chose to enroll at SVA.
RIBA: I knew who Harvey was, of course, and wanted to just meet him if anything. I was initially intimidated by him and the class ... although he was pretty easygoing overall.
When I sat in one class I saw the class doing a crit of the class' homework. I heard that the class essentially graded the pieces, and that aspect of his class scared me. I didn't think of myself as a humor guy even though I could draw sort of funny. Harvey was fairly welcoming to me as a visitor especially when Robert Crumb came to visit the class.
His process was discussed ... especially how he made Little Annie Fanny. He wanted the class to know how important each step was and even handed out xeroxes of rough pages in case any students had gags – chicken fat – to add, and he paid the kids for those gags. He showed the approval process and Hefner's notes on vellum. He even showed the class how Sarah Downs helped with her wonderful watercolor pass on the roughs that would then be passed to Bill Elder for reference.
His class was billed in general as a spot cartooning class and I had no interest in doing spot gags for a living. I never considered myself a gag cartoonist. Ironically, my first real published work were some gag cartoons for an aviation magazine.
There was also the issue of an animation class I needed to take in the same time slot. I discovered later that he was teaching all forms of cartooning really, and not just spot gags. In hindsight I should have made more of an effort to take his class for credit.
Why do you think he decided to teach?
NEWGARDEN: Well, to begin with, all freelance cartoonists – even Harvey Kurtzman – require multiple income streams. But I don’t really have much insight into this, because Harvey had been at it for a while at that point and I don’t think he was exactly enthralled with it. I was under the vague impression that Eisner recruited him.
SVA actually started as a cartooning school aimed at World War II veterans under the GI Bill and by the late 1970s there seemed to be a last-ditch effort to prop that heritage up. The names Kurtzman and Eisner were certainly valuable in terms of attracting customers like me, so I know why SVA wanted Harvey.
SITO: SVA was originally known as the Cartoonists and Illustrator’s School. A number of Harvey’s peers like Burne Hogarth, Shamus Culhane and R.O. Blechman were known to have taught there. Art schools then were reflecting the trend towards Abstract Expressionism, Pop and Op Art. Realistic drawing was looked down upon as kitsch. Many New York-area cartoonists felt there had to be a place to foster young talent when most mainstream art schools could not be bothered to teach cartoons. The Kubert School in New Jersey did not open until 1976. I think Harvey wanted to keep the torch burning.
CARLIN: Honestly, I cannot speak for why Harvey did anything he did. Have you seen the crazy way he would work up sketches? He'd do about eight layers on tracing paper, tightening the drawing as he went.
FINGERMAN: Ugh, that’s a perilous question to answer. I have to imagine economics had more to do with it than the desire to try to enlighten a bunch of callow youths, though hopefully that was a part of why he did. It’s not exactly news or gossip that Harv made a few bad choices along the path of his career. Having a steady gig with health insurance was incentive enough.
What was the class description? And what was his approach?
NEWGARDEN: The class was called “Satirical Cartoon Art.” I don’t remember how it was described in the catalogue. On my SVA transcript it’s mysteriously labeled as “Drawing”. Harvey taught humorous cartooning, which basically boiled down to making gag cartoons. Lots of gag cartoons. We produced stacks upon stacks of gag cartoons, week in and week out, and pinned them on the wall for critiques – or “crickets”. The goal was to make something decent enough to eventually be enshrined in the class magazine, kar-tunz, which admittedly, was a pretty low bar.
This approach seemed like an odd choice to me, since Harvey Kurtzman was the undisputed master of pop-culture satire and panel-to-panel storytelling, but was never noted as a single panel gag cartoonist. Did he ever even do that?
Maybe SVA felt that another comics-making class would duplicate what Eisner was covering. Or maybe Harvey felt magazine gags were still a market a student could potentially crack. In any event, it was not the fantasy Harvey Kurtzman comics class of my dreams.
But Harvey’s class did have structure and he tried to impart some basic principles of humor. I remember him blowing up a large balloon until it burst in his face to illustrate Freud’s theory of tension and release. I’m not sure how many in that class had the remotest idea what he was getting at, but I bet they all remember it.
Harvey taught to the middle of the class, which in theory made sense with such a diverse group. Those that wanted his attention got it, whether on positive or negative terms. I don’t recall the critiques, but I definitely don’t recall Kurtzman laughing at anything. I’m not sure I ever saw him laugh, come to think of it.
He stressed bootstrap publishing – as all of the SVA cartooning teachers did – and we did learn how to put that little newsprint zine together: selling ads, dealing with type and making stats, the mysteries of paste-up and getting the product out into the world. That aspect of the course in particular was invaluable.
CARLIN: This is all clouded by 45 years passing by, but I believe his class was about doing “Gag Cartoons”... which was decidedly different than “Sequential Storytelling”, which was Eisner's bailiwick.
A few years earlier, in high school, I had the chance to be an intern at DC Comics, where it was my job to photocopy incoming art by artists such as Berni Wrightson, Walt Simonson and Jack Kirby. ’Til then I had wanted to draw action-adventure superhero comics, but I saw how much work went into creating every panel of basically realistic representations of the real world and I figured then and there that I'd stick with doing funny stuff.
Luckily I was pretty funny so taking a class in “Gag Cartooning” made sense to me. Sadly, the markets for such work were dwindling even then. Now The New Yorker is pretty much the only place left doing gag cartoons. I still have all my rejection notes from them: Playboy and National Lampoon and others from the late '70s and early '80s.
Harvey's approach was simple. He'd give us a subject at the end of each class, and in the next class we were to bring in our gags. The whole class would hang 'em up and we'd critique them all, with Harvey being the expert voice over all.
FINGERMAN: I wish I’d read the course description. I still would have taken the class, but I’d not have been so crushing disappointed had I known it was teaching single-panel gag cartooning. That was not something Harvey did and it certainly wasn’t something I wanted to pursue. But it was Kurtzman so, like I said, I’d have taken it anyway. My fault for either not comprehending he wouldn’t be teaching sequential storytelling, or just ignoring the brief.
RIBA: Having not actually attended a class from start to finish, I’m not sure what the structure was. I just remember being intimidated by the class crits which, ironically, was a part of Spiegelman's class as well, but by that time I was used to it.
Here’s the class description from the registration booklet. This was from the 1981-82 year, but it was the same as the description from the 1979-80 that I first took the Spiegelman class. This was life-changing stuff for me.
What was his demeanor – and the class's general atmosphere – like?
NEWGARDEN: Harvey was laid back. Maybe too laid back for that group’s antics. The class that year was notorious: talented, high energy, lots of bouncing-off-the- walls mayhem and attention-seeking. Plus the usual assortment of luckless kids from the outer boroughs who imagined that being an artist beat stacking cans of pineapple chunks at Foodtown.
The walls dripped with sarcastic graffiti from previous semesters. Three Stooges noises filled the air like screams in a psych ward. Light switches flickered. Chairs went out windows. At first I was completely turned off by it all and cut class. I’d just go to a movie or the library instead. I investigated transferring to the fine art or film major, but eventually I found a way back in.
In art school you inevitably wind up learning as much from your classmates as you do from the teachers, if not more. Harvey’s class was large, at least 20 students. That year’s bumper crop included Kaz, Drew Friedman, Mike Carlin, Dan Riba, Joey Cavalieri, Chris Reed, Kevin Hein, John Mariano, David Dubnanski and a number of others who went on to make careers in the cartooning, comics, publishing, or animation biz. However improbably, Harvey’s class of misfits and wise-asses beat the odds.
SITO: Just because you are famous in your field, you may not have the temperament to be a good teacher. Over the years I’ve seen many celebrity artists teach. Some just reminisce and tell “war stories”. Others are so intuitive, they struggle to put into words precisely what they are doing. Some whose styles are distinct unconsciously generate students who draw like them.
Harvey had a light touch. He did not preach; he did not pass judgement about others. He liked to listen as much as he liked to speak.
When we presented at the overhead projector, he would read aloud our absurd jokes and react like a deadpan comedian, milking the pauses for effect. Never condescending, he looked like he genuinely enjoyed our stuff. He often talked to us as if we were equals, which was a wonderful morale builder to an insecure kid. I’m the son of a Brooklyn fireman. What the hell do I know about art? But Harvey came from Brooklyn working class, too. He never forgot his roots. He made you feel like if he could do it, you could too.
CARLIN: Harvey's demeanor was very laid back, and the class's atmosphere could be pretty raucous. Each student would definitely get as much or as little as they wanted from this class, but it was a humor class, so a little bit of an irreverent atmosphere was tolerated, and expected.
FINGERMAN: His demeanor was somewhere between bemused and beleaguered, with splashes of good cheer and bonhomie. But also some weariness. He was beginning to manifest some of the frailty associated with Parkinson’s at that point, which none of us knew he had.
How did he discuss his own work?
NEWGARDEN: He didn’t. At least not often. And at least half the class had no clue who Harvey Kurtzman even was. Harvey was just “the teacher”. But when he did discuss his work, it was Little Annie Fanny. Never a mention of Mad or Trump or Humbug or Help! or Hey Look! or anything of the past.
He’d have his previous students-turned-assistants come in and lecture on what they did for Little Annie Fanny. So Phil Felix came in and did a Little Annie Fanny lettering demo. Sarah Downs came in and did a Little Annie Fanny watercolor demo. I don’t think I had actually ever read Little Annie Fanny prior to that class, and suddenly we were being schooled in it.
SITO: Interestingly enough, very little. He discussed his technique doing Little Annie Fanny: how he broke down his panels into graphic shapes. He was full of praise for his collaborators like Will Elder, Jack Davis, and Wally Wood. And he spoke about former students who excelled, like Drew Friedman. He spoke about ideas and writing stories as much as drawing them. And he did toss in the occasional anecdote of Hugh Hefner sending his private black jet, “The Bunny Plane,” to fly him to Chicago for a meeting. Private jets were still a new thing then.
CARLIN: He didn't talk much about his own work except to offer up his thinking on what he would do different when critiquing a specific cartoon a student submitted. Except for the few occasions when he'd show us his process for doing layouts for Will Elder to paint over for their Playboy strip Little Annie Fanny. And as I mentioned earlier, Harvey's process was meticulous and elaborate, to say the least. To say the most: it seemed like overkill to me, then and now – but clearly it worked.
FINGERMAN: Not often, really. He stuck to instructing. The most he got into his own work was the watercolor technique he and Elder perfected for Little Annie Fanny, layering in warm tones first to set the color temperature. That kind of thing. That was the best stuff I learned, in class.
RIBA: From what I understand, he talked a lot about what he was currently doing and his process. He wanted the students to be aware that they would encounter editors and notes and not to be too precious about their work.
I understand that in Spiegelman's lecture class, Art did a better job of outlining Harvey's art, approach and career that Harvey did. The students who were aware of Harvey learned even more about him, and the ones that didn't would go back to Harvey with newfound respect.
How would you compare him to other faculty who were there at the time?
NEWGARDEN: The SVA cartooning department was comparatively skeletal at that moment. Cartooning fell under the auspices of the Illustration department – then chaired by Marshall Arisman – as it still does today.
Will Eisner taught “Narrative Sequential Art” – he would never actually utter the word “comics” – in a class that is ironically called “Comic Art” on my transcript. His classes were less structured than Harvey’s. In fact I can’t recall much actual teaching. You’d come in, keep your head down, and do your work. No lectures, no guests, no class trips. Eisner would more banter than teach, and the things I learned there included what Will Eisner liked for lunch – tuna fish sandwiches – the size of Will Eisner’s ex- employee’s hands – big – and the golden opportunities in life that Will Eisner had missed – he could have gotten in on the ground floor of TV Guide. It was all highly entertaining if nothing else.
Art Spiegelman taught “Language of the Comics”: essentially a lecture class with weekly assignments built in. It was the most structured of the pack and that resonated with me. It felt more like what I imagined college was supposed to be like, although at the time SVA wasn’t technically a college – it finally became New York State-accredited, just in time for my graduation.
Adjacent classes included various humorous illustration courses taught by Arnold Roth, Lou Brooks, and Kurt Vargo, plus a “real life drawing” class taught by Stan Mack. Roth performed affable stand-up in a suit and bowtie, Brooks drowned in flop-sweat waiting for the chairs to fly, Vargo was young and earnest. Stan Mack never noticed that we were constantly floating the most inane conversational bon mots we could summon, auditioning in vain for his weekly “all overheard dialogue reproduced verbatim” Village Voice feature.
SITO: Some professors set up a wall of intimidation between their students and them so they can download their lessons uninterrupted. They never let you forget who is in charge. Harvey spoke to you as an equal. “You love cartoons, I love cartoons. Let’s share our mutual passion together.” Yet he never let the conversation drift off course. He generated inspiration in you as much as dispensing facts. He made you feel you could one day be like him. It was intoxicating.
CARLIN: Harvey's class was pretty loose, which appealed to me compared to other, "drier" lessons – which, again, for me, was perfect as I was very self-motivated and happy to try to curry Harvey's "likes" on my gags.
FINGERMAN: I wouldn’t compare him, really. I mean, he was Harvey. I liked him. He was mild and unassuming, with lashings of cynicism and gentle, often constructive barbs. But I can’t even remember my other instructors in my second and final year, apart from Eisner. My first year I was kind of an asshole. I had a chip on my shoulder, so many of the instructors just sort of irritated me. I got thrown out of class more than once. But mostly I’d shoulder the blame for that.
But in my second year, which is why I went there, and got into my major, it was Kurtzman and Will Eisner as my cartooning instructors. Their styles were very different. Kurtzman had a chummier vibe. I liked Will, but he had a more conventional teaching style. Good, though.
RIBA: I think between Kurtzman and Eisner, Eisner ran his class more like his old shop. He was seated at the head watching the class, and the students were all in rows of drawing tables. Eisner would spend the morning with a lecture about the nature of visual storytelling from the cavemen on to the present day. Then we would be given a general assignment of a project and we would work on it for the next few weeks. There would be some talk here and there during our 'workshop" part of the class, but in general things were more quiet, almost like a work environment.
From what I saw in Harvey's class, it was looser and more free-form with people talking a lot, and a lot of jokes flying around. It was loud and a little raucous at times. I knew students that found the Eisner class a little stifling and left after one day. I went to SVA to learn what Eisner had to teach, so I was more than okay with that.
I don't believe Eisner or Harvey used slides to discuss works. They both had pads of paper or chalkboards to describe a subject. Sometimes Eisner would paraphrase a bit from an old Spirit comic in loose thumbnail form to describe a timing issue like a water drop for rhythm and panel length. But he never took out an old comic and passed it around to show what he did. I'm assuming that Harvey was similar, except when he passed around Annie Fanny roughs.
Spiegelman was the one teaching clear basic comics 101 in his "Language of the Comics" class. He showed us the basic grammar of comics. Each panel is a statement. Each tier a paragraph. The bottom of the page is usually a small question to make you turn the page and begin again until the end.
Using Harvey, Jack Cole, Carl Barks as examples. Spiegelman did more in that one class than Eisner in a semester. And I would include Eisner and Krigstein as more examples that Spiegelman showed in his class. In fact – just as how he showed Harvey's gag structure in Hey, Look and Mad in a way that Kurtzman probably didn't in his own class – he also showed Eisner's storytelling in his lecture better, clearer, and more succinct than Eisner did in his class.
Spiegelman made xerox copies of Master Race and other stories for us to study. He handed out an assignment of a bit of text from Corpse on the Imjin and – as most of us were unfamiliar with the story – asked us to draw a page depicting the dunking scene. Most of us were way off – and it was clear that a few had seen the story and cheated – but the next week we saw where the text came from and what Harvey had done with it. It was a brilliant exercise, and made us realize the power of comic book storytelling. That was something that Harvey probably didn't do in his own class.
Spiegelman was amazing and had a way of getting artists to think more about what and why they do things. We kept comic journals, an assignment each week to describe in comic form something that happened to you. I wasn't a writer, but this forced me to pull events from my life and put them in perspective and in a narrative.
One successful strip I did for class was after a visit to S. Klein's sporting department. I wanted some small weights to build up some muscles on my slight frame, so I cut out the class Charles Atlas ad and included a small frame in the corner of each panel, with the events of my life contrasting with the classic ad. I made Art smile with the strip. it was very validating. He also knew that I was interested in Japanese art so he suggested that I do a biography of Utamaro drawn in his style.
Which of his guest speakers was the most memorable?
NEWGARDEN: The guests that year were interesting. They included illustrators Robert Grossman, Arnold Roth, Rick Meyerowitz, and exploitation magazine publisher/comic book fiend Harry Matetsky. Meyerowitz was easily the most memorable. He was hot off that once-iconic Animal House movie poster and ran a lengthy slide show on his illustrious career, repeatedly assuring the class, drawing by drawing, that before them stood the single greatest cartoonist in all human history. “Look at that! Have you ever seen anything like that? Isn’t it great? I drew that! Look at this one! I drew this one too!” I think even Harvey was nonplussed.
Grossman was memorable in a different way. He spoke knowledgeably and engagingly about caricature, and then quick-sketched me and future DC comics VP Mike Carlin to illustrate his theories to the group. The likenesses were spot-on and I still have mine somewhere at the bottom of a flat file.
The class trips were also memorable. One afternoon we were all bused to Mort Walker’s new cartoon museum in far-off Port Chester. But more significantly we visited the plant that printed kar-tunz, and got a real schooling in the physicality of the printed object. I can still remember watching some poor old bastard in thick glasses and a grey shop apron cleaning and stripping a film negative over a light table, and praying to god that would never be me.
SITO: Terry Gilliam, then in NYC to promote his film Jabberwocky. Al Jaffee spoke about his Mad magazine back cover fold-ins. Russ Heath spoke not only about his career doing war stories like Our Army At War, but also his side work doing commercial illustration.
Robert Crumb came in and said, “ I don’t like to lecture, so I’ll just draw and you can ask me stuff." He sat in the center of our class with a pad, a bottle of ink and crow quill pen. As he drew he talked about things in his life, like how much he disliked the Fritz the Cat animated movie. While he spoke he slowly began drawing a street storm drain and expanded it out to a fully rendered cityscape. Fifty years later, at this year’s San Diego Comic-Con, I was talking to Patrick McDonnell – Mutts – who was in that class with me. He recalled Crumb doing that drawing and recalled it almost exactly as I had!
CARLIN: This was another very appealing aspect of Harvey's class, from his years working on his own magazines like Mad and Help!, and later places like Esquire, his friends and colleagues were to my formative tastes a list of heroes!
Robert Grossman was memorable for drawing caricatures of me and Mark Newgarden, a classmate at the time and a funny cartoonist/comics historian to this day.
Robert Crumb came by as well: clearly the biggest name to most people, and while I was/am a fan, two other guests were more important to my work: Jack Ziegler, my favorite gag cartoonist of all time, and Terry Gilliam, known for his work with Monty Python and as an innovative animator and director on his own. Anyone who knows me knows what a huge Python fan I was/am and Harvey even let a bunch of us students who weren't even in his class yet sit in on Terry's guest appearance.
I was so inspired by getting the chance to look through Gilliam's sketchbook I left the class and started my own books which would serve to chronicle any idea I'd have, which mostly manifested as gag after gag. These sketchbooks would lead directly to me getting my own page in Marvel Comics' Crazy magazine, called "Michael Carlin's Page O' Stuff”, which was simply a crowded page of gags from those sketchbooks.
FINGERMAN: One of my favorites was Rick Meyerowitz, who was acerbic and funny, and a bit off-color. Years later, I got to know him from working on a project about one of his National Lampoon colleagues, the late, great, Charles Rodrigues.
A field trip to another cartooning hero of mine, the also late Robert Grossman, was a real treat. To see his studio was really eye-opening. He’s someone I wish I could’ve gotten to know. A brilliant artist and satirist.
Ron Hague also came by and was very funny.
I would visit Harv after I dropped out and sometimes he’d tip me off about a guest I shouldn’t miss. R. Crumb was such a guest and that was a good one. Crumb’s affection for Harvey, and contempt for his students, was about equal. Very funny.
Jules Feiffer was a great guest, and I caught his attention because Harvey wouldn’t have the students ask questions. He’d have us write them down before the talk, then he’d read the questions to the guest ... to avoid chaos, I guess. I asked Feiffer about his novel, Ackroyd. When Kurtzman read that one aloud, Feiffer demanded to know who’d asked. “You read that book? Even my wife couldn’t!” I told him I really liked it. And I did! He seemed very pleased by that.
RIBA: The only guest I sat in on was Robert Crumb. It was an event. Word spread out in school and people skipped out of their other classes to sit in. Harvey knew it was rare to see him so he was cool with it. But when he arrived he was a little overwhelmed by the crammed classroom. I think I sat on the floor. Robert proceeded to talk about how great Harvey was. I also remember that at some point a question made Robert embarrassed and he left the room for a moment.
Did you contribute to kar-tunz?
NEWGARDEN: I did, and it was a very last minute thing. I had already decided I didn’t want any part of kar-tunz. I didn’t like it and I didn’t like the work I was doing in the class. The editor that year was Drew Friedman and he basically talked me off the ledge at the 11th hour. I have a distinct memory of finishing my contributions in a cab on the way to the printer. It seems hard to parse now and maybe it’s a false memory but it might as well be true, the work certainly looked it. One drawing was entitled “Disillusioned Clowns”, an oh-so pointed commentary on my SVA cartooning experience. And that’s about all I remember.
Harvey definitely understood the value of students seeing their work in print and he would go of the way to help his students get gigs. He once sent Drew Friedman and me to see an ex-National Lampoon writer named Brian McConnachie in a luxurious Upper East Side townhouse. He had just left SCTV with big plans to take over the world with a new humor magazine called American Bystander, which didn’t actually materialize until about 40 years later. But Harvey tried!
SITO: All I remember is I had just seen the Yul Brynner movie Taras Bulba, so I was inspired to draw a comic about wild Ukrainian cossacks having fun drinking and fighting.
CARLIN: It was simply supplying gags for the editor, one of the other students in the class, to curate into a publication available for free to the students of SVA. One year that was Drew Friedman, who has since gone on to astronomical success as a humorous illustrator himself.
And yes, I contributed to kar-tunz. In fact, I even got to do the cover one year.
FINGERMAN: Yeah, but I have no recollection of my no doubt shoddy contributions.
What did you learn about other artists he'd discuss in class?
NEWGARDEN: Harvey didn’t talk much about other artists except Bill Elder. He had a “Crazy Willy Elder” story for every occasion. Maybe because it was such a rowdy group he felt compelled to let us know he’d been there, done that, seen it all. When I finally met Elder a few years later I was shocked at how professional and perfectly sane he seemed to be.
One thing Harvey did do was to distribute piles of magazines to the class every week, mostly from overseas publishers. He must have been on every comics publisher’s mailing list in France. Charlie Hebdo, Charlie Mensuel, Linus, Metal Hurlant, Hara Kiri. He’d just plop down a fresh pile and croak “OK! Take!”, like he was doling out dog biscuits. Harvey was basically cleaning his closets, but he was also exposing us to stuff we would have never seen otherwise, in the most non-didactic way possible.
One week I felt like I won the lottery when in came a stack of old Help! magazines. “Take ‘em away!” I still have the copy of #26 that made its way down the line to me. Looking back on it, I don’t even think he even explained to the class what Help! magazines were.
SITO: Harvey exposed us to a lot of different cartoonists that a working-class New York City kid would not have otherwise seen. No computers or Google Image yet. I think then there were only two stores in the city where you could buy imported European comics, and they were expensive.
Harvey brought in stacks of French comics by Moebius, Franquin, Uderzo. Copies of Metal Hurlant, Blueberry and Asterix. Most of us didn’t understand French, but we were blown away by the visuals. The use of dyes in their color. Using an overhead projector, Harvey analyzed them and discussed their technique and why they were important.
Later, visiting the Musée de la Bande Dessinée in Angoulême, saying I was a protégé of the great Harvey Kurtzman got me invited to a lot of parties.
CARLIN: Both Harvey and Will couldn’t care less about American comics. They were both big on touting the artists of Metal Hurlant and such. But I was much more into the humorous cartoonists by this stage, so I was much more influenced by the guest speakers’ art and comedy than I was by folks in Heavy Metal, which was just starting in the U.S. by that point.
FINGERMAN: I already had a pretty broad base of knowledge of European cartoonists, but Harv would bring in stuff from his personal collectionl and I learned more about his friends René Goscinny and Albert Uderzo, the team that created Asterix. Harvey knew both those guys, and that was cool to learn about.
What was your most important takeaway from your time with Harvey?
NEWGARDEN: “Don’t use magic markers for finished artwork! Learn to use a pen or a brush! Use a Windsor Newton series seven, number 0! Use a Gillot 170 nib! Higgins ink! Strathmore 2-ply plate finish Bristol board for ink work! Cold press for watercolor! HB pencils! Kneaded erasers!” I can still hear Harvey chanting this in a sing- song manner, beating it into out tender little skulls.
It turns out all of this stuff actually matters and I’m not sure anybody else at SVA ever just came out and said it that way.
SITO: I learned from him how to stage a comic panel graphically, which is similar to a storyboard panel. How to control the foreground, middle, and background. How to render complex crowd scenes in greys and blacks so they read clearly, and not be a muddle.
I did some of my earliest comedy writing for him on Little Annie Fanny. He’d give me the main premise, and I would generate a pile of short gags. Watching him select from them which gags to use and what to discard taught me a lot about humor. Things I thought were sure-fire funny he passed over, and gags I threw in at the last minute he loved.
Being a left-handed artist, Harvey did a special session for us other lefties to demonstrate how to draw and render in ink left-handed without smearing your work. He created a little wooden stand on tiny legs to rest his hand on that wouldn’t touch the wet Bristol board.
CARLIN: An important takeaway for me was that cartoonists generally wore denim shirts – at least Harvey did – so that was good enough for me.
The other thing I learned was that you cannot teach or be taught “funny”. That was something you needed to bring to the table yourself. It could be steered and honed by someone like Harvey, acting as an editor, which did come in handy for me when I, myself, became an editor of the action/adventure comics I originally wanted to draw.
So my biggest lesson learned was that everything can help you going forward even if it doesn't seem like what you were searching for. And Harvey's class kept my eyes open for ways to use everything that happened in the class, whether it was something a speaker said/showed or what Harvey doodled and threw away, or even what other classmates were doing alongside us ... Hi, Drew!
FINGERMAN: Well, this is kind of burying the lede, but I started my career with Harvey. As I said, I was a bit nonplused by his actual class, but when he saw my extracurricular work – the stuff I actually cared about and put effort into – he took me out of the classroom, closed the door, and offered me my first real gig, as a contributor to a young adult humor anthology he was putting together, called Nuts! It was aimed at adolescents, and technically I still qualified as one, perhaps the only teen to contribute.
And what he lacked in vigor as a teacher he made up for as my editor. That’s where I really learned a ton from Harv, out of the class itself. So, I lucked out, big time. That’s where I got panel-by-panel dissections of my work, and it really made a difference. That was great.
And I got to know Harv better out of class. He was very kind and affectionate. He once said, “Fingerman” – he only addressed me by my last name – “you’re the son I never had.” That meant a lot to me.
He was very generous and I had an open invitation to visit his home. I only took him up on it once or twice. He was a small, mild man, but it was still too much for my young, stupid mind to feel I deserved to hang out with Harvey. I regret that. Missed opportunity. But hey, at least I knew him at all. A true honor.
RIBA: I heard about the red marker notes on vellum that Hef would throw at Harvey. I learned that even this great genius had to answer to someone ... so, “get used to it”.
Also that he was open to suggestions from anyone to make something better, not to close yourself off to other people's input.
Any other memorable moments you'd like to share?
NEWGARDEN: I always felt like we got the best out of Harvey after class. We would periodically adjourn to the Glocca Morra, a dark Irish pub on Third Avenue between 23rd and 24th streets. Needless to say, one does not do this with one’s SVA undergrads nowadays. Harvey would relax, open up a bit and conversation would flow. We’d ask about Mad, Elder, Gaines, Hefner, whatever, and sometimes we’d get answers. He was a charismatic, decent, down-to-earth guy and he was in his element.
That’s how I like to remember him.
SITO: Harvey liked to tell the story about how he helped create the Monty Python’s Flying Circus comedy troupe. That he employed young cartoonist Terry Gilliam on his magazine Help! and also a young actor named John Cleese who had just come over from England to try the New York acting and modeling scene. While creating a fumetti, Cleese and Gilliam became friends together. When Help! folded Terry Gilliam followed John Cleese to London and met up with “The Cambridge Crowd”: Michael Palin, Terry Jones, Graham Chapman and Eric Idle. And they all became Monty Python.
I was used to Harvey telling stories, but I wondered if this one wasn’t a bit of a stretch? Telling tall tales. Decades later, in 2003, in Hollywood I was working on the Warner Bros lot doing Looney Tunes: Back in Action. John Cleese was there to do a cameo shoot. I went over to chat with him, opening by mentioning that we both knew Harvey Kurtzman. Cleese’s eyes lit up. “Oh, Harvey! Lovely man. Met Gilliam working for him.” He confirmed the whole story just as Harvey explained it.
CARLIN: Memorably, as I alluded to before, Harvey would do quick demonstrations in front of the class. One was a simple black and white exercise in illustrating light and dark contrast in its most basic form. When he was done, Harvey absent-mindedly tossed the cartoon in the garbage can at the front of the class. I thought this was a bad idea and I rescued the piece and asked Harvey to sign it.
You can see by his autograph here that he thought I was nuts – which I may have been – but I still have the piece framed in my home office.
And a tradition was that at the end of every semester he'd take the class out for a beer at the Glocca Morra. I didn't really drink there, but it would have been rude to refuse ... heh heh!
Years later after some success at Marvel and DC Harvey asked me to come and speak at his class. which I did. The whole time I was thinking how lame it was for anyone to have to listen to me compared to the likes of Crumb and Gilliam, but I survived and was able to buy Harvey a beer at Glocca Morra as payback for everything.
RIBA: One day coming home from Barnes and Noble I saw Harvey and his wife and daughter stepping out of a building around the corner of my apartment. He kind of recognized me as someone that hung around his class. I asked him what he was doing there and he told me that he had just been to a premier party for Terry Gilliam's new film Time Bandits. I had just seen the film at a screening with tickets gotten through SVA. I told Harvey that I saw and loved the movie so he took a small red sticker off of his shirt and gave it to me. He told me that the guard at the door would change every half hour or so, so if I waited another 20 minutes I could just claim I was coming back to the party. Harvey's daughter gave me her sticker. Adele had already thrown hers away.
I grabbed my roommate and went to the party at a nightclub called The Underground. I bumped into Gilliam there and I got to tell him how much I loved the movie. I also felt awkward being there having nothing to do with the film, so I confessed that I snuck in by way of Harvey Kurtzman. He then proceeded to tell me what a great guy Harvey was and how important he was to him.
The post Learning from Harvey Kurtzman, part 2: SVA and the Glocca Morra Pub 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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