Plains Indians Ledger Art. Medieval Norman Tapestry. Sung Dynasty handscrolls. Ukiyo-e woodblock prints. Since the dawn of recorded history, artists around the globe have covered current events in a variety of media. What sets comics journalism, a term coined by its most well-known originator, Joe Sacco, apart from other kinds of graphic reportage is not just the medium (comics!) but the message: a willingness on the part of its practitioners to “expose the mechanics of their process.” In Sacco’s own words, “The important thing for me isn’t so much objectivity, it’s-I want journalists to admit their contexts, their prejudices somehow.1”
While Sacco, whose landmark Palestine won the American Book Award in 1996, is the acknowledged father of the field, Harvey Kurtzman was an important progenitor, both as artist and editor.
In celebration of Kurtzman’s centennial, following in the footsteps of many notable comics scholars, I traced his influence on comics journalism from his work at EC Comics through his brief stint freelancing for Esquire Magazine and ending with his time at HELP, published by James Warren, which Kurtzman edited from 1960-1965. I thought I couldn’t admire him more than I did. Boy was I wrong.
The War Comics
I’d never met Jess Ruliffson, author of the Eisner-nominated Invisible Wounds (Fantagraphics, 2022), a collection of illustrated interviews with combat veterans from Iraq and Afghanistan, so I was thrilled with her response to my initial email soliciting her thoughts for this article:
“HARVEY KURTZMAN IS THE KING OF PANTS!!! He rescued me from getting lost in the fabric folds, so to speak, when I was drawing people over and over in uniform. He really is a swashbuckler of line… I have a cherished copy of Corpse on the Imjin that Fantagraphics reprinted in 2012.”
Ruliffson’s project of conducting oral history interviews with US veterans and illustrating their experiences was the closest contemporary analog I could think of to Two Fisted Tales and Frontline Combat, Harvey Kurtzman’s war comics, published by EC from 1950-1955 and 1951-1954 respectively.
Kurtzman researched (with the help of assistant Jerry DeFuccio), wrote, laid out and sometimes illustrated the stories for both titles. The pieces he didn’t draw himself, he relied on a gang of trusted regulars, including Wally Wood, Jack Davis, John Severin and Will Elder, to execute according to his exacting vision.
Kurtzman arrived at EC in 1949, hoping to work on their educational line of comics, which he did as a freelancer until Bill Gaines, EC’s publisher, gave him his own titles to helm. While Two-Fisted Tales was initially conceived as an adventure series, Frontline Combat was a vehicle for Korean War stories, developed as an antidote to the glamorization of combat common in popular entertainment at the time.2 Both famously featured stories based on interviews with military veterans.
According to his wife Adele, who counted his war comics among his proudest achievements, “I used to say, ‘why do you have to do all that. All you have to do is read the papers,’ and he said ‘no, I have to talk to the people.3”
In an exchange with EC historian Greg Benson in an appendix to Corpse on the Imjin, a collection of his EC war comics by Fantagraphics Books, Kurtzman detailed his working methods:
“The army would send me to veterans who were still there, in the army. There was no formula. I had a cousin who was in Iwo Jima. He was my reference. Dave Berg was also a reference for Iwo Jima.4”
Benson goes on to press Kurtzman about the timeliness of the stories.
“If you’re doing something about the Korean War, that’s reportage,” he insists. But Kurtzman equivocates.
“Everything was history. I mean, I never went to the Korean front. It was just a matter of days, months, years, it was all history.5”
Kurtzman, who was drafted during WWII but never served overseas6, would have been familiar with the graphic reportage of the day, pieces like Night Landing, from Life Magazine’s August 1944 issue, and Pulitzer Prize winning cartoonist Bill Mauldin’s Korean War battlefield drawings, for a handful of news outlets. (WW Norton, 1968).
By Kurtzman’a own reckoning, the War comics are historical fiction rather than reportage. In the same interview with Benson, he goes on to describe his process for developing stories, such as Rubble, in which a Korean farmer’s carefully built home is destroyed by American bombers, first conceiving the plot and then conducting interviews with experts for the sake of accuracy, in this specific instance the Korean Consul General.
It’s the specificity of Kurtzman’s writing that underpins the moral complexity of his material. I can think of only a handful of contemporary graphic novels crafted with the same meticulous approach to historical research. Sonny Liew’s Eisner-winning The Art Of Charlie Chan Hock Chye (Pantheon, 2016), a history of Singapore through the eyes of a fictional cartoonist explicitly influenced by Kurtzman, is one of them. Dash Shaw’s Discipline, a narrative about a young Quaker man’s difficult decision to join the Union Army, crafted from contemporaneous letters and journals, is another. Both titles deal with the moral complexity inherent in armed conflict. (For an in-depth look at the moral ambiguity in Kurtzman’s war comics, see Bob Levin’s 2013 TCJ article The Anti-War Comics of Harvey Kurtzman)
Jess Ruliffson, who discovered comics journalism early in her career via the work of Joe Sacco and Sarah Glidden, defines the practice as “anything that shifts the lens away from the self (straight up graphic memoir) and points the camera to the outside world.” She came across Harvey Kurtzman through a friend:
“I forget who, but a very kind friend gave me a copy of the recent Fantagraphics monograph of Corpse on the Imjin when they heard about my project to interview American veterans for a graphic novel…[Kurtzman] has an animator's sensibility for how the body moves, something I've been really curious about emulating in my own work: a sort of balance between Looney Tunes rubberiness and stone-eyed realism. I thought for a long time that "good comics" or "good drawing" was solely the result of hyper-realistic drawing--that you have to be great at perspective and anatomy to be great at comics. I so greatly admire Kurtzman for thumbing his nose at that idea--finding an energetic line that is at times less realistic but speaks so much more truth. I'm still trying to figure out how to balance realism with cartooniness in every comic I make, so it was great to revisit his work and remember how it's done!”
When asked if she has a favorite story in Corpse on the Imjin, Ruliffson replied “Kill! Air Burst, Dying City.....those stick out to me with these crazy almost woodcut looking inky gestures--I love the way he inked figures in action, possessed by a kind of mania yet so restrained. He has a painterly approach yet everything stays highly legible. Corpse on the Imjin is probably my favorite---it's drawn in his inimitable style but also there is a lot of moral gray area that I think my work deals with a lot.”
Mad
As editor of MAD from 1951-1956, Harvey Kurtzman taught media literacy to a generation of young Americans with his parodies of popular films, T.V shows, magazines and especially advertising. What better primer for young radicals? In 1961, Kurt Vonnegut wrote to Kurtzman, pitching a piece about “shelter-hopping kits,” for Cold War era paranoiacs. For only $14.95, the kits would include “A surplus canister of Cyclon B,” and, for an additional charge, a sound recording of “beloved family pets scratching to be let in.7”
Kitchen & Paul Buhle
This wildly satirical, anti-authoritarian attitude would influence a number of fledgling journalists. Joe Sacco grew up on Mad. “All that mattered were those old MADs. They were truly funny.8”
So did Art Spiegelman, author of the Pulitzer Prize-winning Maus. “I was oddly imprinted like a baby duck with MAD. It was like Tree, Rock, Mad.9”
Esquire
Comics Journalism sprang from New Journalism, a term coined in a 1972 Esquire essay by one of its luminaries, Tom Wolfe. A response to the upheaval of the Civil Rights movement and the Vietnam War, New Journalism arose in direct opposition to “tradition-based corporate news organizations, the government, industry10” and featured a more personal, artful, literary approach to non-fiction writing. Writers at Esquire, New York, the New Yorker, Rolling Stone, the Atlantic Monthly, Harpers and other forward-thinking periodicals adopted the movement, so successful it permeated American culture and morphed into “creative nonfiction.”
Harold Hayes, who began at Esquire as a junior editor in 1956 and worked his way up to head editor by 1963, was part of a project to “lighten the magazine up” and attract younger readers. A fan of the Harvard Lampoon and MAD, Hayes became friendly with Harvey Kurtzman, whom he hired for a handful of freelance assignments.11 Reading Paul Hogarth’s appraisal of the state of graphic journalism in 1967, It’s hard not to succumb to nostalgia:
“Burgeoning International Travel is another popular spectacle which is currently reported by a growing number of artists in both books and magazines…Long neglected by the more creative artists and writers, the travel book, or album, has yet to be really revived as a legitimate medium.
The number of editorial assignments is not so large, but these magazines can only thrive on talent. They provide an international school of painter-reporters, illustrator-reporters and satirical reporters with handsomely rewarded opportunities to reach a wide public in both Europe and America. Such diverse talents as Andé Francois, Domenico Gnoli, Robert Andrew Parker, Ronald Searle, Gerald Scarfe Harvey Schmidt Feliks Topolski and Robert Weaver comprise a traveling élite whose global sorties sometimes place them in the supertax bracket.
Although no more than one much sought-after assignment a year from Fortune, Holiday and Sports Illustrated will be given to even the most talented, these magazines will pay on average $2,000 to $3,000 a portfolio with expenses. Esquire and Playboy pay rather less.12”
On freelance assignments for Esquire, (completed after the dissolution of his short-lived satirical magazines Trump and Humbug), Kurtzman married the satirical sensibilities he cultivated at MAD with his relentless visual curiosity and attention to detail to produce several works that shine as comics journalism.
Assignment: James Cagney in Ireland from 1958, follows Kurtzman to the set of Shake Hands With the Devil. The first panel shows Kurtzman receiving a telegram, which reads, “Jimmy Cagney is preparing to make a film in Dublin Concerning the 1920 Irish Revolution. The Film will be called Shake Hands With the Devil. You will fly to Ireland, all expenses paid, to watch Cagney prepare for the Role-The editors.13”
In the subsequent panel, Kurtzman draws himself lying in front of his drafting table, bowled over by his good fortune. But his luck is short-lived. Kurtzman arrives in Dublin in the pouring rain, hunched in a green slicker, schlepping not only his luggage but the tools of his trade.
Through a masterful sleight-of-hand, Kurtzman creates a sequential narrative of which he, not James Cagney, is the star. Over three tightly composed pages, He not only de-glamorizes Hollywood by laying bare the mechanics of life on a film set, he also de-glamorizes the life of a working cartoonist. The comic ends with Kurtzman in his undershirt, hunched over his drafting desk, surrounded by preparatory sketches. The caption reads “home-end of trip-beginning of story.” Anyone who’s ever attempted comics journalism will relate.
Help
A scrappy satirical magazine which ran for 26 issues from 1960-1965, Help launched the careers of comedian Terry Gilliam, journalist and feminist activist Gloria Steinem, and cartoonists Gilbert Shelton and Robert Crumb, among others. As assistant editor to Kurtzman, Steinem, referred to Kurtzman by Harold Hayes’s wife Susan, a friend from Harvard,14 brought in a number of comedians and celebrities to write for the magazine, and to pose for their fumetti features.
During his tenure as editor, Kurtzman instituted a series of “cartoon features” and “sketchbook reports” which sent cartoonist/reporters on assignment everywhere from Mets games to a beauty pageant on Long Island to Soviet Moscow to record their impressions, some entirely comic in tone, others a hybrid of satire and reportage. A number of the features were dispatches from Communist countries, including Inside Coker Inside Cuba, Paul Coker’s 1961 dispatch from Cuba in Help #6 and Arnold Roth’s reports from Berlin in Help #8 and Moscow in Help #12, both from 1961. As Roth recalled in a 2013, “In the early sixties when I lived in England he sent me to Berlin right before Christmas and Russia right before Easter-the two pleasure domes of Eastern Europe. I did spreads on what it was like there.15”
Roth’s reports feature the artist’s bespectacled avatar in a porkpie hat and trenchcoat. On his trip to Berlin, he observes Nazi relics, including Party offices and Hitler’s bunker. At a nightclub, he notes that “War losses have almost destroyed a male age group, and it is quite common to see ‘older’ men escorting young girls.16”
In Moscow, he covers fashion, music, traffic and architecture with characteristic caustic wit. An editor’s note introducing the piece explains that “As part of the trip we’d asked [Roth] to give us a report on the state of our comrades in the humor game. His answer: ‘I dropped by the office of the Krokodil, the Soviet anti-Capitalist cartoon satire magazine. The missile gap may be gaping and Soviet technology booming but there is one place Russia is behind us and that is in cartooning.17’”
I spoke with Roth, now 95, and his wife Caroline, in late August of this year:
ANYA DAVIDSON: Do you have a sense of why [Kurtzman]sent certain artists on certain assignments? Jack Davis, for instance, seemed to only cover the sporting events.
ANOLD ROTH: He [Kurtzman] knew what we all were like, personally. In other words we’d sit at a table and chat with each other.
CAROLINE ROTH: Oh yes you’d all worked together.
Who we were and how we were and what the product would be. We’d come out with the writing, the drawing,
CR: He would have the product in mind and then choose the artist he was just razor sharp on his editing.
Did you consider what you were doing journalism or was it explicitly satire? Was it journalism, was it satire, was it a hybrid of the two?
AR: Well it was a combination. Entertainment and actually being the news man.
CR: But you were mainly heading towards a comic product
AR: I wanted it to also be funny.
Right, the primary aim was to entertain.
Robert Crumb, whose sketchbook report from Harlem was published in Help #22, was dispatched to Bulgaria in 1965. According to comics historian Dan Nadel, Crumb was living in Switzerland with his first wife Dana at the time. The couple traveled to Bulgaria by rail, where they were met by a guide who suggested places of interest.
After the dissolution of Help, Kurtzman continued to champion Crumb’s work, writing in a telegram to Harold Hayes in 1967, “let this snapapart attest to the fact that many years from now when you are trying to get the famous R Crumb to do something for Esquire, Harvey Kurtzman suggested that you use him in your upcoming Hippie issue, and you threw his suggestion in the wastebasket with all the others.18” For the same issue of Esquire, Kurtzman suggested a “family tree diagram tracing the evolution of the hippie up from Bodenheim and through Kerouac and Kesey to the present,” as well as a diagram of hippie dress based on WWII identification manuals.19
A relentless champion for Underground Comix, Kurtzman saw their subversive potential. Concluding a 1971 Esquire essay on the history of American comics, he states “Gilbert Shelton’s ‘Sergeant Death’ stands the whole moral apparatus of the war comics on its head, reaching frantic extremes of fantasy and satire. Now as the Seventies grow older, we are told that the national frenzy is subsiding, that America is getting calmer and greener. Do you believe it? Skip the headlines and turn straight to the funnies, where the whole truth is still out front.20”
Beyond
15-year old Art Spiegelman sent his work in to Help in 1965, just as the magazine was folding. Kurtzman responded with the news that he was leaving for Playboy. Spiegelman had missed his chance.21 But his admiration for Kurtzman served as the template for Raw Magazine, which he went on to edit with Francoise Mouly, and which introduced a new generation of readers to Underground comics. Over the years, Spiegelman cultivated an interest in comics journalism. In a 1997 conversation with Andrea Juno, he describes his interest in the field, detailing a number of his own comics journalism projects, including a tribute to Kurtzman, who passed away in 1993, in the New Yorker magazine.22
As comics editor at Details Magazine between 1998 and 1999, Speigelman commissioned a number of nonfiction pieces by artists including Peter Bagge, Joe Sacco, Peter Kuper, Ben Katchor, Charles Burns, Kaz, Kim Deitch and Jay Lynch. Those artists, in turn, influenced countless others.
The Art of the News, a 2021 exhibit at Oregon State University, Joe Sacco’s alma mater, highlighted Sacco alongside a generation of younger comics journalists, including Ben Passmore, Tracy Chahwan, Sarah Glidden and Sarah Mirk. And while media outlets struggle to develop new, sustainable funding models, the field continues to gain traction amongst people who prefer their journalism authentic, personal, slow-cooked, free of artifice and served with a healthy dose of skepticism, snark or satire. For that, we remain indebted to Harvey Kurtzman.
The post Nose to Nose With Reality: Harvey Kurtzman and Comics Journalism appeared first on The Comics Journal.
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