356 KURTZMAN, HARVEY
and the concomitant contraction of the comic shop system led to the closing of the
press at the end of 1999.
Christopher Couch
KURTZMAN, HARVEY (1924–93). Few comic book creators have had as profound an
eff ect on popular art and media, and culture as a whole, as Harvey Kurtzman. Although
his most important impact may have come as founding editor of Mad magazine,
Kurtzman’s impact as writer, artist, teacher, and publisher cannot be underestimated.
Kurtzman began his career in comics in the 1940s after graduating from New York’s
High School of Music and Art. After doing humor stories for Timely (the precursor to
Marvel ), Kurtzman joined William Gaines’s innovative EC Comics, which published
the most intelligent and sophisticated crime , horror , and science fi ction comics of that
time. Kurtzman’s work as editor, writer, and artist on Two-Fisted Tales and Frontline
Combat in the early 1950s set a high standard for accuracy and quality in war comics.
Kurtzman replaced the jingoism and unquestioning cheerleading of previous comics
with culturally aware and refl ective stories that were often critical of war and exercised
an important infl uence on later war comics such as Blazing Combat (1965–66), which
became controversial for its anti–Vietnam war stance. Because he began in humor, and
then moved to EC, where personal artistic style was encouraged and promoted through
credited stories and editorials, Kurtzman was free to develop his own approach to art.
Usually done with a brush, his stark, economical, and expressive line captured a char-
acter or action in a few strokes. Expressionist painting and woodcuts by masters like
Masereel, Munch, and Ensor helped form the expressive range of his style. Earlier car-
toonists, including Milt Gross, and cinematic comedy, particularly the physical elegance
of Chaplin and Keaton, underlay the humor tinged with pathos of the art of his comic
stories. Although supported and aided by Gaines and artist and writer Al Feldstein ,
Kurtzman set the tone and pattern for Mad , a humor magazine in comic-book form.
Although humor magazines, like England’s Punch , had always featured cartoons,
Mad was all comic book stories. In the conformist 1950s, Mad taunted advertising,
presciently mocked consumerism, satirized political fi gures including Communist-
hunting Senator Joseph R. McCarthy, with unfl inching skepticism combined with
acute comic writing and story pacing. Media satire s, pioneered by Will Eisner in Th e
Spirit , unpacked cultural tropes, and demonstrated convergence in popular media as
television began to dominate the American home. Kurtzman’s design for Mad helped
foster transgressive comedy, from Lenny Bruce to Saturday Night Live. Th e suppres-
sion of comic books in the McCarthyite 1950s, which climaxed when the imposition
of the Comics Code ended EC’s success with comic books. After a brief run as a comic
book, Gaines changed the format of Mad to a magazine to avoid submitting it to the
code, and it became a runaway success. Kurtzman, however, left the book after estab-
lishing it, due to a dispute with Gaines over ownership of the title. He edited a series of
critically successful humor magazines which were commercial failures, including Hum-
bug (1957–58), Trump (1957, published by Hugh Hefner), and the longest-running,
