Comic Art #7
Comic Art is a beautifully designed, infrequently published magazine about great comic book artists. Volume 7 has a fascinating article about Harvey Kurtzman (founding editor of Mad magazine) and his relationship with Playboy's Hugh Hefner.
In 1956 Kurtzman left Mad in a struggle for ownership with publisher William M. Gaines. He thought it was a safe move, because Hefner had promised Kurtzman his own humor magazine. And Hef lived up to his promise by giving Kurtzman a lavish production budget to create a magazine called Trump. After two issues, Playboy was having money problems, and Hefner killed Trump. Kurtzman tried his hand at publishing his own magazine, Humbug, but it folded in 1958.
Now, Kurtzman, one of the greatest satirists of the century, was out of money and out of work. As a freelancer, he started pitching ideas to Playboy. Denis Kitchen, author of the lead article in Comic Art Vol. 7, had access to Kurtzman's archives, which contained most of the correspondence between Kurtzman and Hefner. The letters show Hefner to be an extremely hands-on and thoughtful editor. One of his responses to a Kurtzman pitch was typed single-space on eight sheets of paper!
The pitches and rejections are engrossing and voyeuristically thrilling. I felt sorry for Kurtzman; the guy was desperate and scraping the bottom of the barrel for ideas, but the ideas just weren't clicking. Hef and his top editors were trying to be nice to him in their rejection letters, but they'd slip in remarks like "all we are asking for is the first rate Kurtzman of yore." How hard this must have been for Kurtzman, who was struggling to pay the bills.
The other articles in this issue are excellent, including a piece by Patrick Rosenkranz on early Dutch underground comics. Link
