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BEGINNING ON NOVEMBER 20, through
March of next year, you can go into the Museum of Contemporary
Art in Los Angeles and see the postwar half of the ambitious
survey "Masters of American Comics" (the prewar portion is at
the UCLA Hammer Museum). Featured are Jack Kirby (The
Fantastic Four), R. Crumb (Zap), Art Spiegelman
(Maus), Gary Panter (Jimbo), and more—along with
Harvey Kurtzman, who in moments can make them all seem
square.
In the '50s Kurtzman's MAD
magazine was Lenny Bruce for kids. As a comic book it was the
comics inside out, all id, and going too fast for kids to
catch, especially around the edges of the panels. Nine- and
twelve-year-olds picking their way through the 1954
Dragnet parody "Dragged Net" weren't going to connect
the question that Sgt. Joe Friday continually asked his
partner Ed Saturday—"How's your mom, Ed?"—with Oedipus, and
there was no Oedipus Rex payoff. That wasn't the
point.
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Harvey Kurtzman and
Will Elder, frame from "Goodman Goes Playboy,"
Help! vol. 2, no. 1, February 1962. ©
Kurtzman Estate: Denis Kitchen Art
Agency |
The point was "How's your mom, Ed?" as
absolute non sequitur. What in the world did it mean? The
phrase turned every already-crowded, hysterical page into a
mystery, put a hole in it. There was the suggestion that there
was more going on in the comics you read and the TV shows you
watched than you would ever know.
The non sequitur as the foundation of
Kurtzman's assault on postwar mass culture was an argument
about brainwashing, passivity, entertainment reduced to
mindless consumption, and any other fear-of-mass-culture
shibboleth current in the '50s. It was also someone fooling
around and having a wonderful time. Born in 1924 in New York
City, Kurtzman attended the High School for Music and Art,
where he met his future MAD compatriot Will Elder. He
got his first comics job in 1942, working on the Classics
Illustrated version of Moby-Dick; when he came out of
the war in 1946, he went to work for Stan Lee, later the
founding editor of Marvel Comics. By 1949 he was working for
EC Comics as artist, writer, and editor, producing the
powerful war comics Two-Fisted Tales and Frontline
Combat. But when MAD debuted as an EC title in
1952, it had an impact all over the world. Suddenly, movie
epics and Superman comics were speaking in strange
tongues, their heroes making complete fools of themselves
while carrying on as if everything was going according to
plan. In 1956, after a dispute with EC's Bill Gaines, Kurtzman
left the company. He set about publishing his own,
far-more-obscure magazines, most notably Help!, while
producing the long-running "Little Annie Fanny" strip for
Playboy. Help! folded in 1965, and by then the fuse for
the underground comix explosion was burning—but in truth
Kurtzman had struck the match long before. When he died in
1993, he must have known he had changed the world—or anyway
left it less predictable.
In Frontline Combat and
Two-Fisted Tales, Kurtzman was fundamentally a European
moralist, a serious artist determined to portray the horrors
of war and the dignity of man; in MAD and in the years
to follow, he was an all-American trickster, a con artist who
could actually make art. The non sequitur at the edge of the
frame was Kurtzman's version of the tall tale, told deadpan.
"There are several kinds of stories," Mark Twain wrote in his
1897 essay "How to Tell a Story," "but only one difficult
kind—the humorous. . . . The humorous story is American, the
comic story is English, the witty story is French. The
humorous story depends for its effect on the manner of
the telling; the comic story and the witty story upon the
matter." Twain went on:
The humorous story is told gravely;
the teller does his best to conceal the fact that he even
dimly suspects that there is anything funny about it; but the
teller of the comic story tells you beforehand that it is one
of the funniest things he has ever heard, then tells it with
eager delight, and is the first person to laugh when he gets
through. And sometimes, if he has had good success, he is so
glad and happy that he will repeat the "nub" of it and glance
around from face to face, collecting applause, and then repeat
it again. It is a pathetic thing to see.
Very often, of course, the rambling
and disjointed humorous story finishes with a nub, point,
snapper, or whatever you like to call it. Then the listener
must be alert, for in many cases the teller will divert
attention from that nub by dropping it in a carefully casual
and indifferent way, with the pretense that he does not know
it is a nub.
Artemus Ward [a popular
nineteenth-century American humorist] used that trick a good
deal; then when the belated audience presently caught the joke
he would look up with innocent surprise, as if wondering what
they had found to laugh at.
The non sequitur is the grave part of
Kurtzman's storytelling—and you can just see his "Where'd you
get that?" look when you mention that in "Goodman Goes
Playboy," the otherwise completely naked Playmate of the Month
is wearing a Klan hood.
Written by Kurtzman and drawn by Elder,
"Goodman Goes Playboy" was published in Help! in 1962,
just before "Little Annie Fanny" debuted in Playboy.
Here Goodman Beaver, a fresh-faced towhead back from seeing
the world, returns to Archie-and-Veronica land:
typical-teenager comic-book heaven, where the boys are just
looking for a kiss and the girls are almost too perfect to
look at. It was a world that Kurtzman and Elder had portrayed
in MAD eight years earlier as a riot of dope dealing
and bad skin, with ultratypical Archie ending up in prison,
old and bald, tortured by his memory of the day acned Betty
threw herself at him and he just curled his lip. The kids
buying Archie comic books along with MAD weren't
going to know why Betty's purse contained cigarettes that
didn't look as if they came from a pack, let alone why she had
one of those things the doctor gave you shots with right there
with them.
Goodman Beaver looks just like Jimmy
Carter—or a blond, gosh-wow JFK. But in truth he's Kurtzman's
version of Hawthorne's Young Goodman Brown, the Puritan who
finds himself in the forest at a witches' Sabbath, with all
the townspeople he passes every day, his pure young bride
among them, pledging their troth to Satan. Back at the soda
fountain five years after graduation, the fact that everyone's
talking about Ferraris and champagne and whether the béarnaise
sauce at Point's is better than Le Pavilion's is so weird that
Goodman doesn't even hear them. That there are huge breasts
everywhere—on all the women, in every ad ("Flats Fixed" shows
a Dolly Parton–like mechanic—and I only just realized, writing
this, that the ad isn't just for cars)—is so strange, he
doesn't even notice.
"We're older. We've moved into our own
city apartments"—Archie, beatnik Jughead, slick Reggie,
glamorous Veronica, and good-girl Betty are all living the
Playboy lifestyle, convulsed by it. Looking at the
panels now, nearly half a century later, little has changed.
The Playboy kids with their expensive restaurants and
their Lancias—"Courtesy of the road," Archie keeps saying as
he waves at another Lancia driver, pours him a drink, all but
changes clothes with him—are just the day before yesterday's
yuppies and today's food fanatics. Goodman Beaver wants to
know how the football team is doing. "You've been away too
long," Archie says. "Nowadays, the gang is interested mainly
in hip-ness—awareness." Welcome to the New Age.
Archie drags Goodman to his pad—they
enter the ziggurat-like apartment building through a staircase
built into the womb of a huge statue of a female torso, cut
off just above the waist. He gets Goodman a toga. He's
throwing a party, his last big blowout—a full-scale Roman
orgy—before paying up for all the fun he's had since high
school. "Where did the money come from?" Goodman asks, as
Archie leads him through grottoes filled with Nazi stag films,
porno comic strips, sex dolls, and a crate of copies of the
illustrated edition of Tropic of Cancer. "You want
to know where it comes from?" Archie says, his face
gleaming, his eyes mad. "HAHAHA! I'll tell you where it
comes from! I'VE SIGNED A PACT WITH THE DEVIL . . . THAT'S
WHERE IT COMES FROM! HAAAHAHA!—IN EXCHANGE FOR MY
SOUL!"
This is all very satisfying—up to a
point, or rather up to the punch line that, to Twain, was
really beside the point. As you gaze into the big orgy panel,
taking up two-thirds of a page, and then follow the action
through twelve panels more, your eye is drawn away from the
Playmates diving into the indoor pool filled with grapes, the
men groping the women wrapped in gauze, the couples piled in
mounds. Instead you see what is on the edges of the story: a
woman in a prim suit, spectacles, broad-brimmed black hat,
black cloak and black boots, watching—a Quaker bearing witness
to sin. A huge bust of Tony Curtis, emblazoned "OUR
LEADER—BERNIE SCHWARTZ." A roasted woman with an apple in her
mouth borne by a chef on a platter, then a second roasted
woman carried on a spit. The she-wolf that raised Romulus and
Remus as a wine dispenser. Whistler's mother, naked except for
her white cap. A statue, or a woman, on a pedestal, with her
head broken or cut off, and a man kissing it—or drinking from
it. And you say—Tony Curtis? What's he doing here?
Kurtzman left you hanging, wondering,
falling flat on your face from the trip-cords he left all over
the landscape of the familiar. There was always something odd,
something that didn't fit, something blank and indecipherable
that drew the whole story to itself. "How's your mom, Ed?" All
these years later, I understand that it wasn't just a joke.
Friday knew what Saturday and his mother were doing. He knew
what was going on. But he told his story gravely, as if he had
no idea.
—Greil Marcus is a contributing editor
of Artforum. |
