A Puzzling Period

 Sunday Surprise Day.

Four years ago I shared scans of a rare Harvey Kurtzman book. Kurtzman is best known for being the creator of Mad and doing Little Annie Fanny for PLayboy with Bill Elder. Fans will also know he did a remarkable line of war comics for EC and had a funny filler page in all of the Timely titles in the post war years called Hey Look!. In between Hey Look! and Mad he struggled. He had a partnership with Bill Elder and Carles Stern, did some work for Varsity, but mostly was looking around for new accounts. 

One of those included a company called Kunen, which produced children's puzzle books. Not vooks with puzzles, but books that were puzzled themselves. All of these books had thick double carton pakes and pieces your could take out (and sometimes switch for a nem effect). I don't know who originated this gimicky concept. It sounds like something Kurtzman would think of and he may have. I really should reread that part of Bill Schelly's excellent Kurtzman biography, But as far as I remember even Bill did not find out anything about that period I ddn't already know and Kurtzman himself was always quite tightlipped about it.

All in all Kurtzman did several of these books. Some he did with René Goscinny, a French/Argentinian jewish cartoonist who was staying in New York at that time and even shared or rented a desk at the socalled CharlesWlliamHarvey Agency. That is also where he met another French artist called Morris and started writing his already succesful comic strip Lucky Luke for the French-Belgian magazine Spirou. After a year or so he went back to France, started working with Albert Uderzo and evenually became famous as the writer and co-creator of Asterix and the editor and co-originator of the magazine Pilote.

Another artist who did some books for Kunen was Fred Ottenheimer. Not much is known about thos silly artist, except that he went to the same school als Kurtzman, Bill Elder and later Mad artist Al Jaffee. After doing a couple of books for Kunen, he did filler pages for various Fawcett comics (most of them unsigned and unidentified, although I am keeping a list) and became a publisher when he inherited his family's company. I don't know if he was part of the coterie of Kurtzman in the late forties (Al Jaffee wasn't), but he did become friends with Morris and shared an appartment or a studio with him for a short time (as well as publishing his one and only childrens book).

The one puzzle book I shared here (linked below) was done by Goscinny on his own. In my accompanying text I said I welcomed scans of the others. This week, I saw that a comment was added by Sue (I threw away the mail before noting her last name) offering just that. We exchanged information and she sent me the scans for one of Kurtzman's own books. I kindly let it go out to the world. Two down, four more to go.

One Page Fun

Saturday Leftover Day.

This week I am selling a couple of Timely teen romance books on ebay. My name there is geapelde. Included in this selection are a couple that have Harvey Kurtzman's Hey Look, as well as one that has a onepager by Basil Wolverton. I had to photograph them for ebay, so I thought I'd share them here as well.

The Kitchen Calender

Saterday Leftover Day.

In 2012 the world will end (according to the Mayan calender) or we will celebrate the fact it is twenty years ago Denis Kitchen published is black and white complete edition of all Harvey Kurtzman's Hey look pages (plus some extra's). Now that more and more of these pages are turning up in scan form on the internet, I think it is time for some enterprising pulisher or collector to bring out a new complete version of these seminal cartoon works by one of the three most important American Comic Book artists, this time in color and maybe in digital form for the new I-pad.

Here are a few to wet your appetite.

Special olympics.

Friday comic book day.

Just like last week, I am using the Friday to prepare you for a longer post about Irv Spector. In late 1945 he and Harvey Kurtzman and a couple of other artists were probably asked by Stan Lee to come up with new features. Kurtzman responded with Hey Look and the short-lived Pig Tales. Irv Spector produced several stories of Little Lionel, a cartoon bear who liked sports. When I first came across these stories, I thought they could be by Kurtzman, because they were so different from the regular features in the Timely animal humor line... but it turns out they are by Spector, a former (and future) animator, who created a lovely and lively character and seemed to have a lot of fun with the mostly silent stories. This is the third stoy in my collection. There are at least two more out there, as you can see for yourself if you go to the excellent Atlas Tales website, the place on the web where you can find all information about the unknown years of Martin Goodman's comic book empire, which was run for many years by Stan Lee, before it almost collapsed and finally was turned into what we now know as Marvel.

I have added a Hey Look page as well. If you are in any way interested in Kurtzman or these strips, you should try to find the complete collection of Hey Look strips that was done ain 1991 by Kitchen Sink. If you already have it, here's one in color.










John Krixfalusi expended on this post, by doing a graphic analysis of this story. Go to his blog to look for it.