HARVEY KURTZMAN: MAD GENIUS OF COMICS

A book I can’t wait to get into is The Art of Harvey Kurtzman: The Mad Genius of Comics by Denis Kitchen and Paul Buhle from Abrams Comicarts (254 giant 10.5x11-inch landscape pages, color where necessary; hardcover, $40). A biography of the stylistic wunderkind and protean comedic genius as well as a copious scrapbook sampling Kurtzman’s oeuvre from early to late — including much that has never seen publication before — this tome is the book I have probably been waiting for since 1952, when Mad first appeared in the magazine rack at the corner drugstore at 25^th and Sheridan in the holy city of Old Edgewater. No, I haven’t actually read any of the text in the book, but Kitchen is involved, and if we are to judge from his exhaustive and exact work in previous books (like Playboy’s Little Annie Fanny in two annotated volumes), we’ll find many treasures herein — such as, bless me, the hitherto unpublished three-page Little Annie Fanny origin story in which Our Heroine reminisces about her life, her recollections taking visual form in panels drawn in the manner of Al Capp, Harold Gray (if you can’t imagine him drawing a buxom Annie, you need this book for the evidence), Charles Schulz, Mort Walker’s Beetle Bailey, and Lee Falk’s Mandrake. In addition to samples of the usual array of Kurtzman productions — Mad, Trump, Help, Humbug (another treat, Fantagraphics’ reprinting of the entire run of this classic magazine) — we get glimpses of his advertising art, his army cartoons, the work of Louis Ferstadt, an artist and packager of comic book stories (the Ferstadt sample so rare that it wasn’t listed in Overstreet until the Price Guide’s 6^th edition — see what I mean about Kitchen’s vacuuming research?), John Severin’s picture of the chaos at the Charles William Harvey Commercial Art Studio, some of Kurtzman’s “serious” comic book art, his layouts for other EC artists to follow exactly in drawing stories for Two-Fisted Tales and Frontline Combat, and plenty of funny pages rendered in his best manic manner. A delection. I can’t wait.