The late 1950's and early1960's found Harvey Kurtzman bouncing around a few various magazine ventures. Trump, Help, Humbug. He never really recaptured the glory of his triumph as the editor of MAD, but he did continue to foster a graphic style that was in the spirit of those swinging times!
Talk about In Your Face, imagine the cover of this issue of Help! magazine staring at your from your local newsstand?
Here is another of the many cool work-in-progress sketches featured in the book The Art of Harvey Kurtzman, this one for the cover of Humbug Magazine.
When Kurtzman defected from Mad he was backed by Hugh Hefner in the short-lived publication of Trump. He was joined by MAD alumnus Al Jaffee, Jack Davis, and Arnold Roth.
Both Trump Magazine and Humbug have also been collected and repackaged in box sets for those of you who want ALL Kurtzman ALL of the time!!
william
it's been fun reading about Kurtzman and reflecting on how influential MAD was to us kids - also interesting to think how much more subversive the culture was in the late 50's and early 60's culminating in the anti-war / take it to the streets movements back then - my fave i think was spy v spy and how MAD used every inch of the page to communicate
Posted by: Marguerite Horberg | July 10, 2009 at 07:41 AM
Wow! That top illustration is amazing. Kind of Roy Lichtenstein meets Chuck Close...but scary. I'm loving it.
Mad magazine was quite an amazing thing to me as a kid. It was borderline naughty. We weren't allowed to buy such things except on rare occasions, and what rare treats those occasions were. Personally, I got very excited by the fold up pictures whose subject matter became totally different after the fold.
jan
Posted by: Snippety Gibbet | July 10, 2009 at 07:53 AM