Kitchen, an underground comic artist and publisher, and Buhle, a historian of comics, superbly chronicle the rise of E.C. Actually, the altered format was propitious: since Mad was no longer a comic book, it was not subject to the Comics Code, which had severe consequences for E.C. It was so successful it prompted an immediate reprint. Bill Gaines resisted for some time, but the July 1955 issue marked a radical format change (Kurtzman designed the illuminated logo that identified Mad for decades). “Kurtzman’s thoughtful, more realistic and human depictions of war,” the authors write, “were in stark contrast with competing gung-ho war comic books that glorified war, almost never displayed moral ambiguity and frequently featured Koreans as garishly yellow-skinned and bucktoothed ‘gooks.’ ”Īfter largely concentrating on war, he decided to turn to humor, and Mad was “Kurtzman’s baby from the first moment of its conceptualization.” For the first 23 issues it was a comic book, but Kurtzman had long wanted to edit a “slick” magazine, in an effort to legitimize the comic medium. After the Korean is killed, the American engages in some soul-searching. As the soldier speculates on how the man died, he is set upon by a North Korean and becomes entangled in vividly choreographed hand-to-hand combat. watching an enemy corpse float downriver - the drawing of the half-submerged form is heartbreaking. In “Corpse on the Imjin!,” a six-page story he created for “Two-Fisted Tales,” war is embodied in a solitary G.I. They prefigure recent novels and films that demythologize warfare. While Kurtzman is celebrated for the early days of Mad, his tales about the Korean War have been too often overlooked. Redemption, if it could be found at all, demanded cleareyed understanding of frightful realities.” In Kurtzman’s war stories, Kitchen and Buhle write, “rascals as well as moralists would meet their demise. Although Kurtzman honestly believed that gore was not suitable for children, he was nonetheless driven by a storyteller’s need to be truthful and not romanticize horror. list were Kurtzman’s two war series, “Frontline Combat” and “Two-Fisted Tales,” which displayed a realism not present in similar comic books. It served as the steppingstone for some of his most historically significant contributions to comic art.Īmong the most popular comics on the E.C. Kurtz,” with a little figure of a “man” at the end) were developed during the course of this strip.
#Age of rebellion art free#
As Kitchen and Buhle point out, Kurtzman slid under the radar there and had “virtual free rein.” His distinctive, frenetic minimalism, condensed lettering and rebuslike signature (“H. But his talents were really unleashed in his first comic-book job, doing so-called filler pages titled “Hey Look!” This was an absurdist collection of sequences produced for Stan Lee’s Timely Comics (later Marvel Comics) between 19. Soon after World War II, Corporal Kurtzman made drawings for Yank, the Army’s weekly magazine.
#Age of rebellion art code#
Murrow did on television.” He also fought against a wave of comic-art censorship that overtook the country in the ’50s and fostered the restrictive Comics Code (echoing the role of the Hays Office for motion pictures). He took on Senator Joseph McCarthy as surely and seriously in the pages of Mad as Edward R. “In Mad and all his subsequent ventures,” the authors write, “Kurtzman drew a bead on the phony aspects and idiosyncrasies of modern commercial culture. If this seems like hyperbole, all you have to do is read The Art of Harvey Kurtzman: The Mad Genius of Comics (Abrams ComicArts, $40), Denis Kitchen and Paul Buhle’s insightful, entertaining and profusely illustrated (with rare images of original work) biographical monograph, which chronicles almost everything Kurtzman accomplished - and that was quite a lot. Kurtzman was the spiritual father of postwar American satire and the godfather of late-20th-century alternative humor. Mad, which began in 1952 as a comic book that parodied “serious” comics as well as American popular culture, with an emphasis on television, movies and advertising, was conceived and originally edited by Harvey Kurtzman (1924-93), a Brooklyn-born comic-strip artist, writer and editor. Crumb, Art Spiegelman or an age of irony, period.
If not for Mad magazine, there might never have been (in no particular order) 1960s youth culture, underground comics, Wacky Packs, “Laugh-In,” “Saturday Night Live,” R.
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