When Harvey Kurtzman, the godfather of alternative comics, walked into a nondescript classroom in SVA’s main building back in the early fall of 1970, the din of student chattering instantly stopped. We all sat anxiously waiting for him to start critiquing, one-by-one, the previous week’s assignment. For a little under a year I was among this pack of mostly 18–20-year-old boys, a sophomore in the illustration and cartooning program, and arguably one of the least illustrious students in the bunch.
Having left NYU, SVA was briefly my sanctuary from being swooped up into the Vietnam War draft—an expedient way to retain a 2-S student status, as I wrote in my 2022 memoir, Growing Up Underground. I did not go into detail, however, about Kurtzman’s influence on me at that time because I did not experience it until a year or so after being asked to leave SVA. Instead, my major takeaway then was the realization that I had no talent for ever becoming an exceptional—or competent—comic strip artist. Although I was a MAD magazine addict as a kid, that was after Kurtzman had left MAD over a pay dispute, so I only knew his work from the issues of Playboy that contained Kurtzman and Will Elder’s “Little Annie Fanny.”
Rather than enjoy the fact that I was taking a class with a grand master of comic art, Kurtzman’s course was just one of many I could not afford to fail or I’d be dropped from SVA and reclassified as 1-A (fit for active service). Which is exactly what happened. In a nutshell, my comic strips sucked; I failed the course (and others too), was booted from school, and was subjected to a year of worry that my low draft lottery number (50) would be called. It wasn’t.
The benefit of this class, however, was inestimable. Indirectly, Kurtzman helped change my life, and so did his creation, Alfred E. Neuman. Despite my gross artistic inadequacy, somehow Kurtzman and I became professional friends when, four years later, I was hired as the art director of The New York Times Op-Ed page, where my mandate was to bring in surprising visual contributions. The editor gave me license to occasionally commission a written (and illustrated) article from someone of note on any notion that piqued my curiosity (subject to his approval, of course).
I had always wanted to know the real origins of Alfred E. Neuman, MAD’s resident trickster and mascot. So, I proposed that Kurtzman write a guest OpEd on just that. He jumped at the chance and invited me for a tete á tete at a bar around the corner from SVA. It was during this time that Kurtzman’s work had fallen into a slump, and he was taking on almost anything that paid, including advertising (the kind of work he and his fellow MAD artists once savagely parodied). For the first half hour of our meeting, he apologized that he had to do some emergency revisions—then and there—for the agency art director who had joined us at the booth in the bar. He brought Kurtzman’s sketch (I cannot recall the client) covered with a messy marked-up tissue overlay, ostensibly redoing the entire idea. No compromise; deadline yesterday! Kurtzman was noticeably perturbed but nodded agreeably.
When the self-satisfied art director left, a resigned Kurtzman sighed and apologized again. Then we continued to discuss his proposed OpEd contribution, which surprisingly he delivered the next day, as though it was an antidote to the toxicity of the previous night’s MadAve experience.
In honor of the current MAD magazine exhibition at the Norman Rockwell Museum (covered here last week), and since at this moment I am scraping together random notes of memories for volume two of my memoir (working title: The Times Marches On), I give you a link for Kurtzman’s origin tale—and, as he wrote: “So that’s the story, once and for all. Don’t ask me anymore.”