I’ll trade you a “House That Jell-o Built” for a “Bradley Fertilizer Company”

In my last post I said that American Heritage is one of my favorite magazines, now sadly defunct. What appeals to me are well-written articles on historical topics, but also the beautiful layouts of articles like “Trade Cards,” which appeared in the issue dated February 1967.

These cards, according to author William G. McLoughlin of Brown University, were popular from the 1870s until after the turn of the century. The cards shown are outstanding examples of the craft of advertising when color printing was still a novelty. As eye-catching as they are, my favorite is the one with a child running in the path of a locomotive...to promote a cold remedy! That is what I would call shock and awe advertising.

The article is Copyright © 1967 American Heritage Publishing Co.

I’ll buy that for a dollar!

I love books. I am always looking for books. I buy a lot of books

The past few years I’ve had a lot of luck in thrift stores, with good books for reasonable prices, $1.00, $2.00…sometimes more. Just the last two weeks I seem to have been lucky with things I have found, all for $1.00 each. I thought I’d show what I found.

I love American Heritage magazine. I think it is the finest magazine published in the past 50 years. For many years it was published in a hardcover format. It was expensive, so people tended to hold onto them. Now I can sometimes find them in local thrifts for $1.00 each. I recently found several from the mid-‘60s.

What I like about AH is that while the articles are comprehensive and historically accurate, they are not like articles found in more scholarly publications. No footnotes, for instance. The magazine was criticized over its lifespan for its general appeal, but I believe it was a perfect magazine to make reading about history enjoyable. Many of the articles are well illustrated, too. Sadly, the last issue of American Heritage was published in 2013, and there has been no word if it will be continued.

I have shown a couple of articles from the magazine in this blog. Here are a couple of posts scanned from AH that have been accessed the most from my archives:

“P.T. Barnum’s London Scrapbook”, and “Trader Horn and the one-time-only movie star”.

Stay tuned; I have another article scanned and ready to go very soon.

I am always interested in books on cartooning and drawing for myself and for my young grandkids. I have been lucky to buy some really excellent books since the first of the year.

Although some of Jack Hamm’s drawings may seem dated, his advice is still great. These are two of the best how-to-draw books I have in my collection.

Tom Richmond is a great cartoonist who has made a lot of appearances in Mad, but no, the title of his book on caricature, The Mad Art of Caricature, has nothing to do with Mad, the magazine.

There are also graphic novels, or even informational books. Rock Toons is a history of rock ‘n’ roll originally published in French, translated into English. Mark Alan Stamaty is a cartoonist who sometimes does books for young readers, including this book on his Elvis impersonator act when he was in elementary school. Tom Tomorrow has a well-known satiric weekly panel called This Modern World, and this is a fabulous and comprehensive collection of his work, published in 2003.

Next time you pass a thrift store, pop in and check out the books. You can also find old vinyl record albums, video tapes, CDs and DVDs, usually at reasonable prices. Around my area VHS tapes are usually about 50¢, and prices on DVDs are around $2.00 or $3.00, but I have picked up some good ones, including whole seasons of TV series for a few dollars.

Harvey Kurtzman’s Help! introduced artists..then closed shop

A couple of weeks ago I showed some work Mad creator/satirist/cartoonist/editor Harvey Kurtzman had done for Playboy in the 1960s. While listed as editor of Help! Kurtzman was also doing “Little Annie Fanny” for Hefner in Playboy.

The last two issues of Help!, numbers 25 and 26, from 1965, have historic contents because of the early appearances of artists like Gilbert Shelton (“Wonder Warthog”) and R. Crumb (Zap Comix). Both artists went on to fame in underground comix. The last issue also featured an artist, Terry Gilliam, who went on to fame by moving to England and becoming part of the Monty Python troupe.

Crumb’s observations on Bulgaria are wryly humorous. By using straight-faced captions for his sketches, he shows the dichotomy of the Communist Party line of the worker's paradise, and the reality of how tough life was for the citizens in that era.

Help! #25, 1965:

Both Shelton and Terry Gilliam, with writer Dave Crossley, satirize the then-current Civil Rights movement in the South. In retrospect, they might border on tastelessness, but what they did for sure was name names. Crossley and Gilliam go after the Ku Klux Klan, and Shelton’s strip names Mississippi as a state with entrenched racism. I believe the Ku Klux Klan, which still exists, is mostly obsolete and superfluous in 2016, but racism still exists.

Help! #25:

Help! #26, 1965:

I have wondered since buying these issues of Help! off the newsstands, and then to my disappointment having the title disappear, if Kurtzman’s work at Playboy contributed to the end of Help!. “Little Annie Fanny” is labor intensive. In the age of Photoshop where images can be manipulated by software, it is hard to understand how such artistry as Kurtzman, his friend and coworker Will Elder, and other artists as assistants at times, could produce something so epic. Kurtzman did the scripts as rough drawings, and then worked them to perfection on sheets of overlays, which artist Will Elder followed. Elder was known for his uncanny ability to duplicate the work of other artists, and in this particular strip from January, 1967, shows his multiple talents by duplicating the work of the pop artists of the era. All of it is colored with watercolors. If you look close you see Popeye, the Phantom, Krazy Kat, all done in loving detail. That is, if you can tear your eyes away from the nubile Annie. Artist Russ Heath is credited for assisting on the artwork.

Playboy January, 1967:

All of the artwork above is from the Internet Archive, and is copyright by respective copyright holders.

Harvey Kurtzman, Playboy

Harvey Kurtzman was just 68 when he died in 1993. It seems impossible he has been gone for over 20 years because he created so much, and made such an impression on me that I am still reveling in the work he did in the second half of the twentieth century.

Kurtzman created Mad(1) in 1952, after working in the comic book industry for a few years. During his Mad years he created a lasting legacy of satire. Mad is still with us. Unfortunately, he was not always financially well-rewarded for that gift of laughter. He worked hard, going from magazines to an original paperback book, Harvey Kurtzman’s Jungle Book, to more magazines, including Playboy. Harvey had created and done a very slick satire magazine called Trump in 1956 for Playboy publisher, Hugh Hefner. It lasted two issues.(2) Harvey also did Humbug magazine, which was printed on the cheap pulp paper by the comic book company, Charlton, and lasted 11 issues in 1957-58. The presentation was cheap, but the contents are priceless. It has been collected into a deluxe slip-cased two-volume set by Fantagraphics.(3) In 1960 he began editing magazines for publisher James Warren, including the first issue of Wildest Westerns, and then 25 issues of Help!(4)

In the early sixties Harvey, with his friend Will Elder, went to work for Playboy doing a lavishly illustrated comic satire, “Little Annie Fanny,” which featured funny stories of current events, but mainly SEX.(5) After all, this is Playboy we are talking about.

Here is one by Harvey and Will (with an assist from artist Russ Heath). It is from December, 1964, and Annie Fanny is a very sexy astronaut.

While editing Help! Kurtzman started using a form of comics with photographs. He called it fumetti, after the term used in Italy for comics. While at Playboy he was able to make at least a couple of fumetto, including this funny satire of Antonioni’s Blow-Up. It features a young Michael J. Pollard (“C.W. Moss” in Bonnie and Clyde from the year before), and a whole stable of statuesque, booby Playmates. Kurtzman is listed as Director, but knowing how Harvey worked, I think he probably did it all out with his meticulous storyboards and layouts. Kurtzman put a lot of sweat into his work, but what he did always came out polished and never looks labored over.

I got these two stories from issues of Playboy available at the Internet Archive. 

Copyright © 1964, 1968 HMH Publishing Co., Inc

(1) Atlantic Monthly article on Kurtzman.

(2) Trump; The Complete Collection will be published in June in hardcover. It is available from Amazon.com.

(3) Also available from Amazon, the slip-cover, hardbound volumes of Humbug.

(4) Here is Help! #3, posted by Hairy Green Eyeball.

(5) And never forget, the complete Little Annie Fanny archives are available in Fantagraphics editions sold by Amazon. Out of print and pricy, alas. I hope someone will reprint them at some point.