Humbug

by Harvey Kurtzman (Editor), Jack Davis, Will Elder

Harvey Kurtzman changed the face of American humor when he created the legendary MAD comic. As editor and chief writer from its inception in 1952, through its transformation into a slick magazine, and until he left MAD in 1956, he influenced an entire generation of cartoonists, comedians, and filmmakers. In 1962, he co-created the long-running Little Annie Fanny with his long-time artistic partner Will Elder for Playboy , which he continued to produce until his virtual retirement in 1988.

Genres: Comics, Humor, Fiction, Art

400 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 2009

Reviews

[Rick · Rating 5 out of 5]

Humbug will be a crusading magazine. We will tackle important important national issues such as Should the Mayflower Replica be Allowed to Land in the U.S., and Fluoridation — the Red Conspiracy.

Humbug will be a responsible magazine. We won’t write for morons. We won’t do anything just to get laughs. We won’t be dirty. We won’t be grotesque. We won’t be in bad taste. We won’t sell any magazines.

— Harvey Kurtzman in Humbug No. 1, August 1957

Following the 1956 departure from his seminal creation Mad, editor Harvey Kurtzman developed the slick, full-color parody magazine Trump for Playboy publisher Hugh Hefner. Though the initial two issues, featuring contributors and sensibilities similar to Mad’s, sold well, Hefner canceled the series, citing financial limitations. Soon after, Kurtzman and five of his Trump cohorts — Jack Davis, Will Elder, Al Jaffee, Arnold Roth, and production man Harry Chester — formed a cooperative to publish the humorous Humbug. Although they produced only 11 monthly issues, from August 1957 through August 1958, the magazine paved the way for the general newsstand acceptance of National Lampoon and Spy. Never before reprinted, Fantagraphics recently collected Humbug, complete with new essays, interviews, and annotations, in two handsome hardback volumes.

Inspired by the French magazine Le Charivari and its descendant, the British weekly Punch, Humbug contained parodies (a la Mad), faux ads, and satirical prose sending up various aspects of the media, politics, and sports. Each issue featured the artistic talents of Davis, Elder, Jaffee, Roth, and the occasional guests, such as war-comics illustrator Russ Heath, New Yorker cartoonist R. O. Blechman, and Mad alum Wally Wood. Contributing writers included Larry Siegel (Carol Burnett Show, Laugh-In), screenwriter Ken Englund, and novelist and playwright Ira Wallach.

Jack Davis and Will Elder skewered late-’50s movies, films, and sports. Their individual lampooning of the controversial Tennessee Williams film Baby-Doll, the game show Twenty-one — months before the infamous Van Doren scandal — Mike Todd’s cameo-laden Around the World In 80 Days, the classic TV western Have Gun Will Travel, Flash Gordon, Jailhouse Rock, Frankenstein, Tarzan, baseball, basketball, and auto racing elevated the comic-book parody beyond the standards of Mad and Trump. For Humbug, Davis produced some of the best work of his long career.

Al Jaffee, creator of the famed Mad fold-ins, laughed at the cultural icons and artifacts of the period. In issue one, Jaffee’s amazingly detailed flattened Corn Flake (sic) box as a “medium of communication” created a stir with the nearly microscopic accurate reprinting of the urinating-on-a-house-fire scene from Gulliver’s Travels. (Most likely to silence those who doubted the scene’s veracity, Kurtzman printed it — at standard size — in the series’ final issue.) Cut out, the Corn Flake layout itself folded into a working box. In later issues, Jaffee tackled varied topics — highways, health care, advertising, weddings — all with equal skill and irreverence.

Roth’s contributions overlapped the others, but generally focused more on the politics of the period. For the initial issue, he rendered the first Humbug Award, a regular curmudgeon’s pinup of controversial figures including Teamster’s president Dave Beck, disgraced 1957 Miss USA Leona Gage, segregationist Arkansas Governor Orval Faubus, Mike Wallace, and Santa Claus.

Humbug also published prose pieces mocking the then-contemporary and classic literature throughout its run, of which the hilarious “A Candid View Of Wm. Shakespeare at Work,” “Something of Mau Mau,” “Marjorie Morningsun,” and “Pagan Place” are highlights.

Editor Kurtzman welcomed letters and devoted one to two pages each issue to the missives, complete with his often witty rejoinders.

For the attractive slip-case-covered reprint, Fantagraphics wisely includes several insightful and interesting extras. The introduction establishes the proper context and historical background for the key players and the publication. A fascinating Kurtzman oeuvre rounds out the introduction. An interview with Roth and Jaffee offers an insider’s account of Humbug’s creation and inner workings. The playful banter between the artists, who clearly like and respect one another, and the inclusion of rare photographs of the entire staff enhances the interchange.

Most importantly, scholar John Benson annotates all 11 issues. In the ensuing 50 years, several of the pop-culture and political references have faded into obscurity. In perhaps the only deficit in an otherwise magnificent two-volume set, all the annotations are included at the end of Book Two. Splitting the notes between the two, placing the revealing backstory closer to the facts in question, would have better served the reader.

Man — we’re beat!

Oh yes — it’s too much.

Radiation has got us beat.

The levelling-off period has got us beat.

Satire has got us beat.

1953 — We started MAD magazine for a comic book publisher and we did some pretty good satire and it sold very well.

1956 — We started TRUMP magazine and we worked much harder and we did much better satire and we sold much worse.

1957 — We started HUMBUG magazine and we worked hardest of all and turned out the very best satire of all, which of course now sells the very worst of all.

—Harvey Kurtzman in Humbug No. 11, August 1958

This review originally appeared in San Antonio Current May 13, 2009.

[Ruz El · Rating 2 out of 5]

If allowed I'd give it 2.5.

First off, the quality of this collection is absolutely top notch in every way and Fantagraphics deserves a lot of credit for collecting these magazines complete as they have. Everything is here and looking better then it did when originally published. The art quality is fantastic with Elder and Davis in particular putting in amazing work that surpasses what they were doing in the previous Mad magazine. For Kurtzman and comic history fans, I can't imagine a better package.

Which brings up my main problem, the material isn't particularly good. I don't think it's a "dated" thing, though it is certainly more dated to read now then the Mad Magazine material published at the same time. The issues are just a bit of a mess. Overly wordy articles that are missing the lean mean satire of Mad. Even the first couple issues feel padded, and when that's happening in a 32 page monthly, well, it's not a good thing. It might be more sophisticated in tone, but it falls flat.

Maybe it was high expectations on my part since I never thought I'd get a chance to read these, but over all it just didn't work for me.

[Paul · Rating 3 out of 5]

I was anticipating this compilation for some time. And while it features some American cartooning greats working at the top of their game it never quite reaches the highs of Kurtzman's Mad and Panic. Maybe it's the typed text balloons or the dual color. The humor isn't as sophisticated as the jump out of the comics ghetto would have you suspect nor is it as sophisticated as some of Kurtzman's War comics which were directed at a much younger audience. The design of this edition and of the orginal books themselves are beautiful however.

[The other John · Rating 3 out of 5]

Like many of my peers, part of my childhood journey included hours reading Mad magazine. Over the years, as I would read different issues and paperback collections, I began to learn about the magazine's history--how it started out as a comic book back in the 50s. Occasionally I would come across a reprint of a story from that era. They seemed to be wilder than the parodies of the 70s, and I always enjoyed reading them.

I never have got around to reading a collection of the old Mad comics, but I did pick up this collection of Humbug magazine, a 1957 endeavor by Mad alumni Harvey Kurtzman, Will Elder, Jack Davis, Al Jaffe, and Arnold Roth. The contents varied from mildly amusing to that old Kurtzman/Elder/Davis craziness. But for the most part, I enjoyed the collection mostly as a funny slice of nostalgia. I appreciated the jokes, but didn't connect with them the same way I would with humor from my own era.

[Michael P. · Rating 2 out of 5]

I began reading nearly everything is these volumes in the hope I would find the pieces amusing. A few I did, mostly the comic book-like television and film parodies. I enjoyed a couple of the text articles and found it interesting that Kurtzman was so obsessive about the USSR getting Sputnik up before the US could match them. Feature after feature in issue after issue near the end of HUMBUG's run trade on this. Anybody studying American paranoia over Soviet technical prowess in pop culture should pay attention, but I was bored by these features as I was by most of the features in HUMBUG.

[Dominick · Rating 3 out of 5]

This complete collection of Kurtzman and company's collective effort--all eleven issues, carefully restored--is nice to have and features some stunningly good cartooning. Everyone's impressive--Jaffee, Roth, Davis, Elder of course, though Davis perhaps shines the most here. And there's some genuinely funny stuff. But it's very uneven, and a lot of it is rather badly dated. Nor do the annotations help, particularly; in fact, they seem rather half-assed, often opting to explain the relatively obvious while saying nothing about what are pretty clearly very topical references incomprehensible without some sort of contextualization. Indeed, nice as the whole project is, it also feels somewhat half done. The restoration's generally very good, for instance, but the process involved not merely restoring but also resetting a lot of the tpye. The book claims it carefully corrected typos, preserving only what it deemed deliberate errors. If so, however, the bar was very low; the number of typos here is truly depressing. And the last couple of issues were published larger size than the earlier ones and consequently look a bit cramped in this uniform format. Nevertheless, this is an important piece of American comics/satire history, and it's nice to have it, even with the imperfections.

[Frederick]

I spotted this in a bookstore the other day. Get a first edition while you can. This is going to be a valuable book. On top of that, this slipcased, double-volume set looks as if it will be very funny.
It's essentially fifties-era MAD Magazine with all the stops pulled out. Most of the people involved were MAD artists. Al Jaffee, of course, does the MAD fold-out to this day.
It's sixty bucks, but remember, a year ago that only got you a tank and a half of gas.

[Djll · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is an amazing collection. I had no idea this magazine existed, but given the roster I'm not surprised at the quality. However, the subtlety of much of the humor is a refreshing change of pace from its cousin MAD (not to take anything away from Gaines et al). Highly recommended for fans of MAD and fifties nostalgia. In fact, it's probably a good primer for watching Mad Men. On top of all that, the packaging and reproduction is top shelf all the way.

[James · Rating 4 out of 5]

All those involved were genius artists, but with the exception of Jack Davis they were lousy businessmen!

[Wayne · Rating 3 out of 5]

Good stuff, not as great as Mad magazine, but overall way above average collection. The design of this 2 volume set is what stands out. Great year for Kurtzman.

[Alex Robinson · Rating 3 out of 5]

Beautiful packaging and artwork but the jokes are pretty corny and don't hold up well.

[Scott · Rating 5 out of 5]

I eat, drink, and sleep old Mad comics and magazines, so yeah. Except for the very first piece, "...Gelded Unicorn", I thought it was one bull's eye after another.