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My MAD mentor: Terry Gilliam on Harvey Kurtzman - Telegraph
I remember when I first saw Harvey Kurtzman. There was something small and nutlike about him. He was like a beautifully polished acorn, slightly brown and hard and nice. There was a politeness about Harvey, which wasn’t really what I was expecting. As a kid, I was quite voracious with comics. On the news-stands in Fifties California, where I lived, you’d get Superman, Captain Marvel, Batman. And the newspapers were full of cartoons, from Fritz the Cat to The Katzenjammer Kids to Blondie and Dagwood – it was endless. This was probably the peak of comics in America. I loved cartooning and I immediately started copying my favourites. I didn’t think about it, it was just like eating, just food; I absorbed as much of it as possible.
The big leap was MAD comics, which gets us to Kurtzman. The comic book MAD, which Harvey founded in 1952, were parodies of comics, using them as political and social satire. The idea of parody was something that was quite new and fresh, and that’s what MAD did brilliantly well. If you’re doing a parody you’ve got to be as good as the original – in some ways you’ve got to be better. Their stuff was smart, it was funny, and it was very sexy too. So much so that I used to hide the comic in the garage so my parents didn’t see that I had this proto-porn.
The big leap was MAD comics, which gets us to Kurtzman. The comic book MAD, which Harvey founded in 1952, were parodies of comics, using them as political and social satire. The idea of parody was something that was quite new and fresh, and that’s what MAD did brilliantly well. If you’re doing a parody you’ve got to be as good as the original – in some ways you’ve got to be better. Their stuff was smart, it was funny, and it was very sexy too. So much so that I used to hide the comic in the garage so my parents didn’t see that I had this proto-porn.
