LEVINE AND KURTZMAN'S "CHRISTMAS CAROL"

Here's a novelty that I didn't know existed before: a "Christmas Carol" parody written by Harvey Kurtzman and drawn by caricaturist David Levine. It appeared in Esquire sometime in the early sixties.

It's not Levine's best work, and Kurtzman's seen better days but, c'mon, any collaboration by talents like these demands a viewing. BTW, click to enlarge.

It's eerie to see Levine doing comics. Lots of famous illustrators came to grief in the comics medium. Evidently sequential storytelling requires a knack that's rarer than commonly supposed.

Then again, you could argue that this is a parody of comics in general as well as of the Christmas Carol in particular. It probably looked a lot better on slick magazine paper than on the net, and it probably made a nice visual counterpoint to the photography in the rest of the magazine.

I'm amazed at how well the formal, standard-font lettering works in the word balloons, and how the borderless panels fit Levine's style so well. Elder did borderless panels for Humbug and the same technique didn't work for him.

THE DAY I MET HARVEY KURTZMAN

Joel Brinkerhoff wrote a comment to my last post about Harvey Kurtzman, and thinking about the man reminded me of the one and only time that I actually met him. For what it's worth, here's the story.

It was at a comics convention. I stumbled on Harvey when he was alone behind a pillar with an outrageously beautiful fan girl. She was standing inches away from his face, telling him how great he was, and how she'd do anything to show her devotion.

The reason I know what they were saying is that I walked up close and stood beside them, hoping to get an autograph. I guess I must have looked impatient because when the girl noticed me the spell was broken, and she apologized and left.

I tried to get Harvey's attention but he was totally fixated on the girl. He had a cold sweat and turned his head slowly as he watched her leave the room. She looked pretty good, even from the back.

When he finally turned to me I cheerfully offered him a pen and a cocktail napkin to write on, and he gave me a crazed look like he wanted to kill me. He muttered something like "No autographs!"  and lit a cigarette to calm his nerves.

That was my only up close encounter with Harvey Kurtzman.

DID AL CAPP CREATE MAD MAGAZINE?

No, of course he didn't. Harvey Kurtzman did, but according to Mike Fontanelli there would nevertheless have been no MAD without Capp. Writing for the ASIFA-HOLLYWOOD ARCHIVE site, Mike says Mad's idea of making fun of comic strip characters, which is how Mad got started, came directly from Capp's running parody of Dick Tracy, "Fearless Fosdick."



Now that I've had a chance to think about it, that doesn't surprise me at all. Capp influenced Mad, Mad influenced Saturday Night Live, and SNL influenced...well, a sizable chunk of modern American comedy and culture
.


Dick Tracy was made for parody. Look at him: banana hat rim, razor-sharp profile, weirdly-graded hairline, an almost-too-good-to-be-true dedication to his work...



...and a delight in beating up criminals.



Fosdick doesn't just beat them up, he shoots them! It was really nice of Chester Gould to let Capp parody his character to such an extreme (above, click to enlarge). He never asked Capp for money, and never leaned on Capp to dilute the humor.



Fosdick was enormously popular with the public and newspaper editors alike. According to a Pageant Magazine the syndicate begged Capp to do Fosdick as a regular second strip, along with "L'il Abner." Capp declined. He was afraid that a too frequently appearing parody would soon run out of gas.

With the popularity of Fearless Fosdick, other comics parodies began to appear. Most fell flat but one was a spectacular success.









That one was Kurtzman's Mad. I don't mean to imply that Mad was a rank imitator. You can see from these first three pages of "Superduperman" (above) that Kurtzman and Wood added a lot to the Fosdick idea. Even so, the influence is obvious. The parody is pushed Capp-style to it's absolute, over-the-top limit. Kurtzman parodied lots of strips, not just one like Capp, so he didn't have to worry about running out of ideas.






Mad had its work cut out for it. It's hard to go farther over the top than Capp.



But Mad tried, and the public loved it. These were the days before political correctness when fun wasn't a crime.



Capp was amazing. Here (above) the criminal mastermind is a talking chair. Of course every crime boss has a dame and the chair is no exception. I'd have guessed that a chair might have a stool for a girlfriend, but nope...the girl is a real, live, human female. I wonder what their dates were like.


There's a lot more to Mike's article than appears here. Check it out at the ASIFA-Hollywood archive:

http://www.animationarchive.org/