© Playboy magazine
eerily resembling Hans & Moritz
You Vill go MAD in
I am not going to even try to talk about Harvey Kurtzman. Except to say that I cannot read this social critic's stuff
without bursting out laughing at least once every panel. It may be me, but not only.
Further down a list of stuff available at Amazon (also
Germany, 
Canada and the 
United Kingdom); you could order blindly random as far as I'm concerned as it's all good. However, that list keeps changing. For very nice reprints of old MAD magazine issues, go to Gemstone Publishing. I couldn't find anything there now, though I got many goodies there in the past. But they did send catalogs on request. They also sold Carl Barks. Cheap, they're not. Worse, I don't get a cut!Worst, I'm afraid they stopped operating!
Master of the visual pun and then some. When I first saw his stuff I thought it wasn't drawn so well! Figure that one out (hint: I was 17 years old, the age when Will was doing oil paintings). Robert Crumb collaborated on Little Annie Fanny and gave up. That sort of rendering was very hard, he said. Uh huh.
Bill Elder has a PS - Personal Site - you really should visit it.
| Chicken Fat Now in production: Gary Vandenbergh's film on Bill Elder check it out here going fine... |
If you have money to blow, you can buy his original drawings from Denis Kitchen.
Rather ironic to see drawings from Goodman Beaver offered for sale there at prices of $1200 or so.
At the time he made them, it was not such a big hit. That's how the cookies tend to crumble.
Good for Villee, anyvay!
Finally!
This collection is really great, and comparatively, cheap, too
(but only in the economic sense—and when I say "only" I mean that—it's Rich).
Contains a lot of the rarer stuff that most of us never had a chance to enjoy
like from Panic, Trump, Humbug, Help! and Pageant.
The way I figure, I'd have been a fool not to have bought it
(I'd have been sorry for the rest of my unnatural life
and so you should be)
and then...
more books by Kurtzman and Elder
For the die-hard fans
I found this in Poland. I had absolutely no idea what it meant, but Peter Neilson wrote me:
New Requirements - New Tasks.
As Peter remarks, the next question is Why?
The picture was made on an Exakta, the same camera James Stewart uses in Alfred Hitchcock's Rear Window.
These clunkers often had shutter problems... mark the dark bands on the right.
Gemstone Publishing
P.O. Box 469
West Plains, MO 65775, USA
417-256-2224
to order 1-800-EC-CRYPT (1-800-322-7978)
fax 417-256-5555
or try one of these links
Russ Cochran's Comic Art Emporium (check him on eBay)
Kurtzman & Elder books
Little Annie Fanny Volume 1
Little Annie Fanny
Volume 2
Many people do not seem to like Hugh Hefner, but he was the guy who kept Harvey Kurtzman in work. Ergo, more power to him. Not only is this strip among the best produced I know; Hefner also seems to have financed at least one of Kurtzman's independent magazines. They were all flops in the long run; maybe Help! was the biggest hit (the ones I have were even distributed in Europe), but eventually it died. Little Annie Fanny is the female counterpart of Goodman Beaver, something so obvious to the savvies that I hesitate to put that down here. Really fine craftsmanship by Bill Elder.
Utterly Mad
The Mad Reader
Selections from the two first MAD years when Kurtzman was editor; mark that these have almost always been in print since then. Originally published by Ballantine Books, later Signet; I have them all but they are really too small. Some look pretty wasted because they kept reprinting them without going back to the originals. A shame. Still, if that's all you can get?
Will Eisner's Shop Talk
Knowing Will Eisner, should be the goods
The Grasshopper and the Ant
Hey Look!
A solo effort
Nuts! 1
Another solo effort?
Nuts! 2
Still another solo effort? I really can't tell you.
Harvey Kurtzman's Strange Adventures
Don't know this myself, but I WANNIT!
From Aargh! to Zap!: Harvey Kurtzman's Visual History of the Comics
Same here. I WANNIT!
My Life As a Cartoonist
I WANNIT!
Harvey Kurtzman's Jungle Book
I'm starting to repeat myself. I WANNIT!
Goodman Beaver
I HAVE IT!
In an old pocket edition. It's good! Never very macho to start with, Beaver eventually got his sex changed; the operation was quite succesful and he even turned into a Sex Symbol, Little Annie Fanny. Good Villie Elder stuff; the panels are just crammed with those details that make you laugh out loud. Goodman always reminds me of my very good biologist friend Rolf Bak. Somehow. (They, not he, tell me he is one of the top 10 coral reef experts in the world. My, the guy is a professor twice! and loves strips. Just goes to show you.)
Monster of the Year
Haven't seen it, but my guess is Harvey is a mere collaborator here. Still, what's wrong with that?
Bill Elder—The Mad Playboy of Art
This is an absolutely marvelous book. Tells a lot about Bill (like, his pseudonym is based on the name of Flemish painter Pieter Breughel the Elder—not the Younger); shows classes of his works that I had never seen before. You really owe yourself this one.
And it's comparatively cheap, even! Come on, man...
A complete list of all issues of MAD's
first two years, edited by Harvey Kurtzmann
The only one around!
finally!
HUMBUG
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