Product Description

Harvey Kurtzman changed the face of American humor when he created the legendary MAD comic. As editor and chief writer from its inception in 1952, through its transformation into a slick magazine, and until he left MAD in 1956, he influenced an entire generation of cartoonists, comedians, and filmmakers. In 1962, he co-created the long-running Little Annie Fanny with his long-time artistic partner Will Elder for Playboy, which he continued to produce until his virtual retirement in 1988.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #97571 in Books
• Published on: 2008-08-13
• Format: Box set
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Hardcover
• 400 pages

From Publishers Weekly
Starred Review. MAD's early years have been justly lauded for their japing assault on postwar American culture, but this outstanding two-volume boxed set reflects the history of comedy in the period after staff stars like Kurtzman jumped ship in 1956. Humbug, whose mere 11 monthly issues published in 1957 and 1958 are all collected here, was a refreshing if little-noticed seat-of-the-pants hybrid of MAD-style buffoonery and a tony wit that sadly never found its place. Read today, Humbug seems a time capsule from when comedy was entering its drier, postvaudevillian period; comedians still wore ties and were expected to if not attend college at least have read a book or two. The magazine's mix of chaos and control—Kurtzman's Cecil B. DeMille–sized comedic crowd scenes set against Larry Siegel's pitch-perfect literary satires—creates an uneasy balance that almost necessitated a short shelf life, much in the same manner as National Lampoon (which years later briefly picked up the mantle that Humbug threw down). The set might not be best for end-to-end reading (11 issues is a heavy dose, with all those Sputnik and Have Gun, Will Travel references) but for dry cocktail laughs and low schoolboy snorts, it's hard to think of a better pair of books to have at your nightstand. (Mar.)
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From Booklist
When editor Harvey Kurtzman left the original, comic-book-format MAD to helm the Playboy-size Trump for Hugh Hefner, he took the best MAD artists along with him. Most stayed with Kurtzman when Hefner shut down Trump but let the staff retain its offices to produce Humbug. Owned equally by Kurtzman and four artists, Humbug lasted only from August 1957 to August 1958 but realized, more fully than anything else Kurtzman edited, his dream of a topical satire magazine primarily for adults. Kurtzman packed Humbug’s 32 pages with movie and TV parody comics like those that dominated his MAD; single-panel and sequence cartoons similar to the New Yorker’s; prose parodies of popular novels with, usually, one illustrative cartoon; parody product advertisements; and spoofs of popular-magazine articles on such pop-culture staples as child care, dieting, physical fitness, sports, and trends. All of Humbug except the Trump reprints that plumped up the final issue is in this set, along with an appreciative introduction and a long interview with Humbug co-owners Al Jaffee and Arnold Roth. It’s the dawning of contemporary satire in a box. --Ray Olson

Review
Humbug is a testament not only to Kurtzman’s genius, but to the astounding skills of his fellow artists as well—people like Jack Davis, Will Elder…Al Jaffee and Arnold Roth and R.O. Blechman. (Comic Book Resources )

Humbug reveals Kurtzman as a satirist who still demands our attention. (Ben Schwartz - Bookforum )

A comics blockbuster. (John Defore - San Antonio Current )

A deluxe collection of a classic but long-forgotten satirical magazine…Originally edited by Harvey Kurtzman of MAD fame, and written and drawn by his MAD compadres, among them Jack Davis and Will Elder, Humbug was cool beyond cool. (Roger Sabin - The Guardian )

A lot of Humbug’s humor now tickles the mind more than the funny bone, collected here it serves to fill in the missing piece on a seminal period of satiric shenanigans. (John McAlley - NPR.org "Books We Like" )

Featuring the entire run of Humbug satirical magazines masterminded by Harvey Kurtzman, creator of the legendary US comic MAD, this luscious two-volume box set will fascinate. (David McComb - Bizarre Magazine )

In a way, Humbug almost feels like a goof-humor version of The New Yorker or something. There’s a lot of fairly serious political/social commentary, cloaked in wry rainment. It’s a blend as interesting as any cocktail, and it’s goddamn great to have this stuff easily available. Hats away! (Byron Coley and Thurston Moore - Arthur Magazine )

It’s Humbug that functions as the spiritual father for magazines such as National Lampoon, Spy and The Onion, among many others, but there’s something invigorating about it because of its vantage point in the supposedly stodgy and bland 1950s. Coming out of that decade, Humbug really did break new ground. (John Mitchell - North Adams Transcript )

It’s a really impressive collection of work... and the production design here is nothing short of stunning. Fantagraphics really knocked this one out of the park in restoration. (Chris Mautner - Robot 6 )

Kurtzman and company aimed high for a more sophisticated humor mag than the competition...Fantagraphics’ package for it is bar none—handsome, sturdy and restored with great care...I was most interested in the behind-the-scenes story of Humbug and the creative process that went into it—not to mention doomed it—and the book’s introduction and exclusive interviews more than satisfy on that count. (Rod Lott - Bookgasm )

Never before reprinted, Fantagraphics recently collected Humbug, complete with new essays, interviews, and annotations, in two handsome hardback volumes....Jack Davis and Will Elder... elevated the comic-book parody beyond the standards of MAD and Trump. For Humbug, Davis produced some of the best work of his long career. Al Jaffee... tackled varied topics... all with equal skill and irreverence. (Rick Klaw - San Antonio Current )

Smart writing, savvy pop-cultural lampoons mirroring the mid-century’s social turmoil, brilliant artwork. (Michael H. Prince - Fort Worth Business Press )

The Humbug set from Fantagraphics is out and it's great. Fine printing and binding will keep this slipcased two-volume set looking good long after the rest of us are gone. (Harry Lee Green - Hairy Green Eyeball )

This is the best thing I have ever been sent to review. I didn't think that this book would ever exist but now it does and it'd better than I could have imagined... The eleven issues of Humbug are faithfully reprinted in this two-volume hardcover set and it comes in a fancy and sturdy box. The magazines were funny and beautiful with art by Will Elder and Jack Davis and some other folks. If you don't buy this book then I don't want to know you...There is no excuse for not buying this right now. Sell your hair, blood, or skin to get it. (Nick Gazin - Vice )

This lovingly restored collection of Humbug's five issues is accompanied by essays, interviews and annotations, providing a glimpse into what MAD had wrought. (Richard Pachter - Miami Herald )

This omnibus of all eleven issues of Humbug is equal parts giddy genius and period piece. The satire is razor-sharp... [T]here are such subtleties here and such rapier wit that the line is clearly visible from the Algonquin Round Table to Kurtzman to Crumb to Ralph Bakshi to Mr. Show to The Colbert Report. (Byron Kerman - PLAYBACK:stl )

Unparallel parodists Kurtzman and Elder ran rampant for themselves when they published these 11 exceptional issues of comic art anarchy. This two-volume hardcover box set has been reproduced from the original art and digitally restored to make everything look even better than when it first came out in 1957. This long-overdue definitive edition of Humbug is an essential slice of satire from the masters of the genre. (Jeffrey Morgan - Detroit Metro Times )

[A] superb two-volume boxed set that reprints Humbug in full, plus it also contains proper introductions and interviews with some who worked on the magazine. The material is excellent. It's Kurtzman, Elder, Davis, Al Jaffee, Arnold Roth and a few others working at the peak of their awesome powers. The package is excellent. It's well-designed and well-printed, and I can't think of a way in which it could have been improved. (Mark Evanier - News from ME )

[I]ncludes so many all-time great cartoonists (Kurtzman, Jaffee, Elder, etc.) at the peak of their powers and ambitions. (Timothy Hodler - Robot 6 )

Customer Reviews

Humbug: one of Mr K's best
A tip of the hat to Fantagraphics for this sumptuous two volume Humbug package. The complete eleven issues (well, not quite: sixteen pages are missing but I'll get to that shortly) of Kurtzman's third attempt at a humor magazine. By all accounts though, it seemed a bit of a non-starter. It was the wrong size, wrong price, wrong pagination and printed on the wrong paper despite a cracking editorial team. All of this is put right with this reprint which is on a decent bit of stock so the art really sparkles. Incidentally both books have a four page section at the back detailing the problems of reproducing the original art.

Book one has an eight page introduction to the magazine and at the back a thirty-four page interview with Al Jaffee and Arnold Roth. Both features give a lot of background to Kurtzman, the artists and the business decisions surrounding Mad, Trump, Humbug and Help! Everyone seems to agree that with Humbug Kurtzman reached his peak and I would agree with this. There are some seriously funny features in just eleven issues and don't forget the great artists: Jack Davis, Will Elder, Jaffee and Roth. Fans of Jack Davis (especially me) are in for a treat because there's tons of it including some wonderful two panel pages with a `Scenes we'd like to see' kind of feature.

Like Mad and Trump there are some great ad parodies and like the color covers they are printed on a slightly better paper. Another neat idea are the ten pages at the back of book two called Annotations where ads and features are explained to those who weren't around to buy Humbug on the newsstand.

The missing sixteen pages? By issue ten it was clear that the magazine was going nowhere financially so the size, price and pagination were upped for issue eleven, a quick decision it seems because to fill out the pages from the normal thirty-two to forty-eight (not including the covers) sixteen pages of the failed Trump were included. The copyright for these are owned by Playboy and there is a reprint of the two issues to be published so it would sort of spoil things to have them included in this Humbug reprint (and no doubt the copyright fees were the deciding factor).

Kurtzman fans will love these two books (in their handsome slipcase) and it only remains for a reprint of Help! to more or less complete and celebrate an American original funnyman. Don't forget to check out: The Art of Harvey Kurtzman: The Mad Genius of Comics, the definitive coffee table book about the great man.

[...]

Laugh Out Loud, Fall Of Your Chair Funny
First off, "Humbug" is just plain hilarious - there were times reading "Humbug" when I was laughing so loud, I was afraid the neighbors were going to call the police. Kurtzman is definitely on a high note during this period, and Larry Siegel, who would go on to write for Mad and other humor magazines, puts in some great prose work as well. Al Jaffee and Jack Davis put in career best work - their art is stunning - I just have never seen better from Davis. Jaffee's articles, the writing and the art, are spectacular, inventive, imaginative, scathing in their satire. Arnold Roth was a great discovery for me in this collection, and I immediately picked up "Free Lance," deeply discounted on Amazon. Will Elder's photo realistic ad parody's are incredible, and of course he also contributes his usual brilliantly madcap illustration of Kurztman penned comics.

The material, if anything, was amazingly timely - I was astounded at Kurtzman, Jaffee, Roth and Siegel's ability to find those timeless qualities in the everyday in their satire. True, today's sensationalistic media, game shows, corrupt politicians, intelligence-insulting ads, and chintzy consumer products have different names, but they still have qualities that touch on the universal folly of humankind, and thus we can relate to the humor presented in "Humbug."

The material that is firmly of it's time serves as a history lesson, and in some cases, is a reminder of how far we have come as a nation. The civil rights movement was just getting started, and many of the "Humbug" articles touch on racism. Their (cartoon) version of Olberman's "Worst Person in the World" was called "The Humbug Award," one of which was given to Gov. George Wallace (a racist Governor who tried to stop desegragation), which prompted a firestorm of critical letters in the magazine's letter column, followed by equally angry letters supporting "Humbug" - the civil rights debate strait from ordinary people from the time period.

The collection is annotated by John Benson, a comics historian who has written several books, and edited several EC and Kurtzman fanzines, including "Squa Tront." His notes are fairly complete. There is also an extensive interview with the surviving "Humbug" artists, Al Jaffee and Arnold Drake, all of which helps to put the work into context.

"Humbug," in my opinion, is far more accessible then the old Mad Comics, because the Mad comics were mostly comic book, television and movie satires. I have the two DC Mad Archives, and tho I find many stories outrageouly funny, and the art is suberb, I haven't seen more than half the movies they are parodying. Also, the Mad Comics become very formulaic as you read them, since they have a set, concrete page count and pattern.

In contrast, "Humbug" is a magazine with articles of varying length, which include comic strips (usually parodying a movie or t.v. show), gag panels (by New Yorker artist R.O. Blechman), prose articles, and articles that combine prose and illustration in imaginative ways. There are single and double splash pages, beautifully rendered by Jaffee, Roth or Davis, that parody the onset of spring, a resort town, holiday parades, summer sporting events, sports car racing, etc - the detail in these drawings is stunning, a testament to the labor of love "Humbug" was.

"Humbug" is some of the funniest material I have ever read, right up there with the best of Charles Schultz, R. Crumb, Roberta Gregory, Bill Watterson, Roz Chast, and, of course, anything Kurtzman, Roth or Jaffee ever did in their careers. This is a must-have collection for humor comic/magazine fans.

A classic for it's time.
This is a great collection. The artwork is stunning. THe jokes are very dated and for me (at 47) there were few "laughs". These books do not read over and over like the classic MAD books.
However this flaw is the only one.
THe book's production values are beautiful.
And the art, Jack Davis, Will Elder, and so on, is beautiful. Al Jaffee also submits some gorgeous work.
I would consider this a book for artists looking for the visiual treat and or a slice of art history in a time capsule.
Jack Davis and Will Elder's artwork in these books is exceptional. For this alone this is a 5 star book for people that LOVE these guys art.