The Art of Rebellion
From “The Art of Harvey Kurtzman”
If not for Mad magazine, there might never have been (in no particular order) 1960s youth culture, underground comics, Wacky Packs, “Laugh-In,” “Saturday Night Live,” R. Crumb, Art Spiegelman or an age of irony, period. Mad, which began in 1952 as a comic book that parodied “serious” comics as well as American popular culture, with an emphasis on television, movies and advertising, was conceived and originally edited by Harvey Kurtzman (1924-93), a Brooklyn-born comic-strip artist, writer and editor. Kurtzman was the spiritual father of postwar American satire and the godfather of late-20th-century alternative humor. If this seems like hyperbole, all you have to do is read The Art of Harvey Kurtzman: The Mad Genius of Comics (Abrams Comic Arts, $40), Denis Kitchen and Paul Buhle’s insightful, entertaining and profusely illustrated (with rare images of original work) biographical monograph, which chronicles almost everything Kurtzman accomplished — and that was quite a lot.
“In Mad and all his subsequent ventures,” the authors write, “Kurtzman drew a bead on the phony aspects and idiosyncrasies of modern commercial culture…. He took on Senator Joseph McCarthy as surely and seriously in the pages of Mad as Edward R. Murrow did on television.” He also fought against a wave of comic-art censorship that overtook the country in the ’50s and fostered the restrictive Comics Code (echoing the role of the Hays Office for motion pictures).