Months ago, I wrote a post excitedly anticipating the release of a two-volume set of books compiling the complete run of Humbug, a humor magazine that ran for eleven issues in 1957 and 1958. It was created by the core trio behind some of my favorite comic books ever, the original 23 issues of Mad Magazine, Harvey Kurtzman, Bill Elder and Jack Davis, joined by two other cartooning superstars Al Jaffee and Arnold Roth. Despite my intense interest in this magazine, I had only seen one issue in my life.
Well, the book is almost a year late, but it’s finally been released by Fantagraphics, and I got my copy. First, Fantagraphics always does a first-rate, extremely respectful job of art reconstruction in its reprint books, but this may be the best I’ve ever seen. These are beautiful books, exquisitely reproducing the magazines.
But now that I’m finally reading the Humbugs, I do have some reservations about the actual comics. The Kurtzman/Edler material seems to have lost the manic spirit that marked their Mad work. On his multi-panel pages, Elder’s art is crowded out by the typeset lettering, and he has less room to run free. His large ad-spoofs are amazingly drawn, but the satire, as it seems with much of the Kurtzman material I’ve read so far, is a bit flat — he seems to go 20 or 30 degrees off the target of his satire, instead of the 90 degrees or more that’s needed.
And, as noted in the Introduction, the material does often rely on a very detailed knowledge of certain 1950s culture. John Benson provides helpful annotations in the back of the second volume to explain some of the references, but of course a joke with footnotes isn’t going to cause any knee slapping.
There is also some filler, like the skippable text features and Punch Magazine reprints.
As a real fan of these guys, I’m still delighted with the books, and of course they’re still full of gems. In Issue 3, Al Jaffee does a full-page illustration showing a modern, luxurious cityscape, with state-of-the art shopping facilities, lavish sports and racing facilities, and huge finned cars, but the eye is drawn to the bottom of the picture, where a rickety schoolbus pulls into a delapidated, old building labelled “Public School No. 1.” The caption: “Our hope of the future lies in the children gaily returning to school.” Jaffee eloquently says in one image what I’ve struggled to get into my 9-panel, wordy format for years.
There’s plenty of top-notch stuff by the whole gang. And the art, including Roth’s, is brilliant throughout. Anyway, I’m still reading it, and (with those reservations) enjoying it a whole lot.