ESSENTIAL // 12.12.02

JUNGLE BOOK and GOODMAN BEAVER
By Rob Clough

JUNGLE BOOK. Originally printed in 1959 by Ballantine Books. Reprinted
in hardcover by Kitchen Sink Press in 1986 and in softcover in 1988. ISBN
087816-033-7. Written and drawn by Harvey Kurtzman.

GOODMAN BEAVER. Published in 1984 by Kitchen Sink Press. ISBN
0-87816-006-6. Writing and layouts by Harvey Kurtzman. Art by Will
Elder.

Harvey Kurtzman is one of the four or five names in comics from the 20th century that will continue to be remembered by a select few as the years go by. It's a shame, however, that a great deal of his best work continues to stay out of print. This was a man who not only directly influenced the first generation of underground cartoonists, he also directly influenced the first and second generations of alternative artists that followed. Robert Crumb and Art Spiegelman, who agree on very little, both absolutely revered the man. Like all great satirists, such as Swift and Rabelais, Kurtzman was able to mix in ribald references along with biting commentary. Even if you've never heard his name before, the reader no doubt is familiar with his most famous creation: MAD magazine.

Kurtzman created it, wrote it and did the breakdowns for the hall-of-fame caliber artists with whom he collaborated: John Severin, Jack Davis, Wally Wood and Will Elder. While MAD has been formulaic and predictable for quite some time now, when it first came out in the 1950's it was a breath of fresh air. Mass-market satire was completely new, and Kurtzman took aim at superheroes, cowboys, horror movies, gangster movies, and every pop culture target and authority figure he could think of. While his gags were good, it was the rhythm of the stories that he created that made them so funny--a background detail suddenly made an average gag hilarious. When Kurtzman lost control of his own publication due to disagreements with publisher William Gaines, he created a series of ill-fated but brilliant satire publications. One was for Hugh Hefner and it was called TRUMP, a MAD aimed at adults. It lasted all of two issues. Another was HUMBUG, which lasted 11.

Ballantine Books had had some success publishing paperback collections of the early issues of MAD before Gaines took his business elsewhere. So they called upon Kurtzman to create an all-new collection of stories for a paperback, and thus was born JUNGLE BOOK. If "all-new collection of stories for a paperback" sounds like "first graphic novel" to you, then I would agree. It describes to a T what many consider to be the first American graphic novel, Will Eisner's A CONTRACT WITH GOD, only without the fancy terminology. Once again, Kurtzman was ahead of the curve.

The book would wind up being a unique item in Kurtzman's publishing history. He did everything, from writing to art to lettering. There were four stories, half of which are parodies of then-popular TV shows and the other half takes on the world of publishing and stereotypical small-town southern living. Some of the stories have aged better than others, since topical satire can half a brief shelf life. However, the topicality of the stories was less important than how deeply he was able to cut to the heart of the subject matter. For example, he did a parody of the 1950's detective series "Peter Gunn". That show was about a detective who loved jazz and hung out in a club in-between beating people up, and who talked in "hip", beatnik slang, daddy-o. Kurtzman's version was called "Thelonious Violence", a name that cleverly conjured up the absurdity of the situation. In the story's first panel, we see Thelonious looking over a corpse in a jazz club, narrating the scene: "A Dixieland combo played hot licks in the background...his head was full of crazy lumps. He was like rapped on the skull with knucks. Concussion by percussion and brass..." Our eye then drifts to the bottom of the page as we read on: "Somehow I was suspicious of the daddy-o with the slide trombone". The reader then looks up to see that the trombone player, copping a "who, me?" look, absurdly has a brass knuckle-shaped tip at the end of his slide. It's a brilliant image that shows Kurtzman's total mastery of the panel and how words can shape pictures and vice versa.

Kurtzman's own figures are extremely exaggerated--especially the impossibly curvy women who set up punchline after punchline for the lecherous Thelonius. Taking on a case of blackmail from one Lolita Nabokov (!), he leaves the club because there are too many beautiful women around only to be further distracted at Lolita's house by her three
beautiful sisters. He didn't want to be disturbed further until he learned that the case would lead him to the Seraglio School For Young Ladies. He left there to go to Atlantic City--holding the Miss America pageant that weekend.

The funniest bits in the story are the fight scenes set to jazz-with scat singing in the background, narrating the fights. A great payoff in that story along with some absurd juxtapositions make it work even after the original references have gathered dust. This doesn't quite work for the other parody in the book, "Compulsion on the Range". A "Gunsmoke" parody, it was supposed to focus on the new trend in westerns: the
Freudian hero. Western characters were now shown to have been driven by neurosis and mania in certain films and shows. The problem with the story is that it doesn't mine this idea nearly enough, instead sticking with more standard cowboys, gunslingers and indians. Still, Kurtzman was a master of comic timing. The slow-shooting Marshall is slow on the draw every time, but the way Kurtzman paced each panel, the audience is suckered every single time that THIS is the draw the Marshall wins. A strong finish saved the story from mediocrity.

Kurtzman was also a master of dialect, well-demonstrated in his look at the South (and Southern fiction), "Decadence Degenerated". Taking a cue from Tennessee Williams and his own experiences, Kurtzman created a small town filled with corrupt sheriffs, violence-loving yokels, and the hysteria that surrounds a lynch mob. If a lynch mob story seems a bit grim for a humor comic, Kurtzman lightened the mood with the actual dialogue. The supposed Southern gentlemen loitering around the town fountain all blurt out polite inanities to the sweet young woman who walks by...but all of them are imagining her naked. The story confronted hypocrisy in a rather brutal manner and again used a number of visual tricks to bring home the laughs after the audience is horrified by what is said. Perhaps Kurtzman's best trick is a repeated image of the town of Rottenville from above--a small, dusty town with just a few stores here and there. After there's a murder, there's another full-page view of Rottenville where the narrative ends: "It's nothing you can touch or point out...you just feel the difference. And somehow you know-tonight Rottenville isn't the same." The image we see this time is a bright, bustling New York-type city--but with the same layout we saw earlier on, down to a fountain in the center of the main road.

The most autobiographical story was also the most trenchant attack on hypocrisy in America. Called "The Organization Man in the Grey Flannel Executive Suite", it introduces Goodman Beaver, the idealistic young everyman that Kurtzman would bring back in slightly different form in the pages of HELP! It's about young executive Beaver, who joins the ranks of a seedy publishing company. Modeled after Marvel's Martin Goodman, they simply copied everything they could, in the form of a horror magazine, a
men's true adventure magazine (popular at the time) and a Playboy-style skin magazine. Walking into the offices of Schlock Publications, he's amazed at the tableau in front of him, as the men and women in the office were creating magazines right before his eyes. Of course, as the reader drifts down the page, we discover that the workers are discussing nothing more than coffee.

Worn down by mediocrity, the bottom line, keeping profits high and costs low and the way the corporation chewed through older executives, Goodman eventually is corrupted and given a lecture by Schlock himself. Schlock is then surprised to discover in the end that Goodman has learned from the master only too well after he quits, but not before he carries out a rather drastic form of revenge.

JUNGLE BOOK is pure, unadulterated Kurtzman. About the only downside to the printing is that it looks a bit muddy, even in the cleaned-up Kitchen Sink versions. Still, it preserved Kurtzman's rubbery, sketchy and exaggerated style along with the flow from panel to panel. There are few comics artists who used the space between panels as well as Kurtzman. He used them to stretch time, set up punchlines, provide breathers and keep a story flowing, moving the reader's eye exactly as he wanted. While he didn't have the more idealized rendering style his collaborators possessed, JUNGLE BOOK showed that his stories didn't necessarily need to have that level of detail to succeed.

After JUNGLE BOOK, Kurtzman moved on to found yet another magazine, the aforementioned HELP! For the first time, he was working with new cartoonists who had grown up on (and were warped by) MAD. He published the earliest works of cartoonists like Robert Crumb, Gilbert (FABULOUS FURRY FREAK BROTHERS) Shelton, Jay Lynch and others. He also had as assistant editors such talents as a pre-Monty Python Terry Gilliam (who did a number of his weird cartoons) and a certain Gloria Steinem.
Kurtzman also continued his longtime collaboration with Will Elder, whose anarchic and page-packing style made him the most effective of the group who worked with Harvey. Elder simultaneously held to the spirit and rhythm of Kurtzman's breakdowns while jamming in a seemingly endless number of extra visual jokes into each panel. This "crowded style" was a huge influence on Evan Dorkin, among many others.

Kurtzman brought back Goodman Beaver for a series of a stories in HELP!, and they were collected by Kitchen Sink. The concept behind each story was that of placing an innocent in a corrupt situation, and seeing how their naiveté would get them in trouble. The stories ranged from amusing to truly nihilistic, with the latter stories remaining much fresher today. Kurtzman stated that he was inspired by Voltaire's CANDIDE, a similar
story of an innocent beset by corruption. He was especially interested in attacking "progress" whose end result was dehumanization. That's what gave rise to JUNGLE BOOK's title--in the end, we're just a bunch of apes, acting like animals towards each other.

Two of the Goodman stories, "Goodman Meets Tarzan" and "Goodman, Underwater", began with an amusing idea but ultimately were little more than entertaining fluff. The first featured a send-up of the White King Of The Jungle that showed Tarzan exploiting his jungle pals, and then segued into a series of Cold War gags. The second crossed a parody of the old TV show "Sea Hunt" with Don Quixote, again throwing in some Cold War humor amidst Elder's visual underwater gags. Elder makes both worth reading
with the way he simply stuffed the page with visual puns and details.

Things get interesting with "Goodman Meets Superman". Here, Goodman leaves a city filled with murder, crime and degeneracy for a quiet day at the fishing hole and meets a disguised Superman. Superman has quit because he keeps helping people who are ungrateful ("Do you know what they did when I upheld the law? They treated me like a cop! They threw garbage at me from the roofs!") and is sick of doing good with no reward whatsoever--especially since he thinks people are no good anyways and don't deserve his help. Goodman desperately tries to convince him otherwise, but a chance meeting with Lois Lane turns sour when Superman learns that she's married a weasel of a corporate executive. Goodman himself fails a final test and walks away muttering, "I guess not even supermen can be 100%". The funny touches thrown in by Elder complement the overall grimness of the story.

Even more biting is "Goodman Gets A Gun", wherein Goodman becomes a police officer. Attending a party, he bombs out trying to get the attention of a beautiful girl, until she notices that he's carrying a gun. Suddenly, he becomes the life of the party--but he thinks it's because they're responding to his (apparently) now magnetic personality. So when the gang goes off to a dangerous bar, Goodman is helpless because he's quit the force and gotten rid of the gun. Goodman is beaten senseless by a bully, who goes off with the women he came in with, and is stuck with the bill! It's a hilarious take on the way power affects one's standing with both men and women.

One of the Goodman stories, "Goodman Goes Playboy", was not reprinted due to a long-ago legal action by an offended publisher. Only the publisher wasn't Hugh Hefner (who took the jibes in stride), but rather Archie Comics. In it, Goodman goes back home to Riverdale to visit with very thinly-veiled versions of Archie. Influenced by the "Playboy
Philosophy", everyone has given up on their wholesome activities and instead chases after fast cars, free love, and orgies of Roman proportions. When Goodman asks Archie where he got the money for all this, he revealed that he had sold his soul to the devil and that he was coming for it that night. The devil later appears to the gang and offers the same deal...and Goodman remains unsure of whether or not he should take it. The story is an attack of the "Playboy Philosophy's" emphasis on hedonism, decrying its moral & intellectual emptiness and emphasis on conspicuous consumption. Ironically, the Archie characters are used as models of wholesomeness--but Archie didn't see it that way, threatening legal action. Elder redrew the story later to remove the more obvious Archie references, but that brought further legal threats. It's a brilliant story that features some of Elder's most ambitious art.

A further twist is that Kurtzman would next go on to create "Little Annie Fanny" for Playboy magazine, showing that Hefner at least had a sense of humor. Fanny would be an essentially female version of Goodman, with Elder continuing the collaboration. Two volumes have just been reprinted by Dark Horse, and while they're worth reading, they don't approach the work just discussed here. While both JUNGLE BOOK and GOODMAN BEAVER are long out of print, it is relatively easy to find on-line. Both e-bay and bookfinder.com listed it as available after a recent check.

Recommending humorous artists is a dangerous pastime, considering how personal humor can be. At the same time, someone who virtually invents a genre and is listed as an inspiration for dozens of today's artists (and not just in comics) is someone who merits further exploration. While not all of the jokes will seem as funny as a modern cartoonist's, he was the architect of a style still used today. More than anything else, Kurtzman happily corrupted the youth of America with a gleeful sense of irreverence. The seeds he planted not only resulted in Crumbs, Spiegelmans and Gilliams, but also John Belushis and George Carlins and Onions. Harvey was America's court jester, making jokes at everyone's expense, but especially the phony and the powerful. America could use a dozen like him right now.