About Help!

Help!

Help! was an American satire magazine edited by Harvey Kurtzman and published by Warren Publishing in New York from 1960 to 1965. Its first issue was cover-dated August 1960 and its last, the twenty-sixth, was dated September 1965. It was Kurtzman's longest-running magazine project after he left Mad and EC Comics, and it was also his cheapest: a chronically underfunded monthly that mixed comics, photographic fumetti, prose satire, and reprinted classics on a shoestring. Despite the poverty of its production, Help! remained inventive throughout its five years, and it introduced or gave early work to several young creators who later became central figures in underground comix. It folded in 1965, remembered less for its circulation than for the talent that passed through its pages.

Harvey Kurtzman After Mad

Help! cannot be understood apart from its editor's career. Harvey Kurtzman had created Mad as a comic book in 1952 and converted it to a magazine, then left EC in a dispute over control. His next ventures were short-lived: Trump, a lavish satire magazine published by Hugh Hefner in 1957, collapsed after two issues, and Humbug, financed by Kurtzman and his fellow artists in 1957 and 1958, survived only eleven issues. Kurtzman spent the late 1950s freelancing for magazines such as Esquire, Pageant, Playboy, and TV Guide, and published his paperback Harvey Kurtzman's Jungle Book in 1959, which introduced his wide-eyed innocent character Goodman Beaver. When publisher James Warren offered to co-publish a new humor magazine in 1960, Kurtzman took the deal: Warren Publishing handled the business side, while co-ownership gave Kurtzman the editorial control he had always demanded, even if the budget sharply limited what that control could buy.

A Magazine Built on a Shoestring

Help! was, by design and necessity, the cheapest of Kurtzman's magazines. Where Trump had spent freely, Help! economized at every turn. Its pages leaned heavily on photographs, publicity stills, and old illustrations in the public domain, with ironic captions and speech balloons added. Photo comics, called fumetti after the Italian term, were cheaper to produce than drawn panels, because staff members, friends, relatives, and visiting comedians could act them out in front of a camera. Kurtzman called in favors from famous friends who posed for covers or appeared in features, and he filled pages with reprints of classic cartoons and comic strips. The result looked rough beside its slick competitors, but the roughness became part of the magazine's identity: a handmade, improvisational satire produced by people who were plainly enjoying themselves.

Comics, Fumetti, and Goodman Beaver

The magazine's signature contents combined three elements. First came original comics by Kurtzman and his long-time collaborators, above all Will Elder, whose dense, meticulously rendered artwork carried the Goodman Beaver stories written by Kurtzman. Goodman, a relentlessly optimistic innocent, blundered through satires of big business, Tarzan, and contemporary manners. Second came the fumetti, photographic sequences with balloon dialogue, performed by staff and guests. Third came prose humor, satirical features, and reprints of masters such as Winsor McCay, Milton Caniff, Bud Fisher, Heinrich Kley, Thomas Nast, and H. M. Bateman, which let a small magazine claim a distinguished lineage at almost no cost. Science-fiction writers including Ray Bradbury and Robert Sheckley also contributed, and short prose by figures such as Rod Serling appeared in the early issues.

Celebrity Covers and Comic Guests

Because Help! could not afford expensive artwork, it traded on personalities. The cover of the first issue featured television comedy star Sid Caesar, and subsequent covers read like a roll call of American comedy at the turn of the 1960s: Ernie Kovacs, Jerry Lewis, Mort Sahl, Jackie Gleason, Jonathan Winters, Tom Poston, Hugh Downs, and Dave Garroway among them. Inside, fumetti and features drew appearances from Dick Van Dyke, Henny Youngman, Jean Shepherd, Orson Bean, and Milt Kamen. Two then-unknown performers who appeared in the magazine became vastly more famous afterward: Woody Allen, and John Cleese, who was photographed for fumetti before Monty Python existed. The willingness of established stars to pose for a tiny humor magazine testified to Kurtzman's reputation among comedians, who regarded him as a founder of the satire they practiced.

The Staff: Gloria Steinem and Terry Gilliam

The small editorial staff of Help! included two assistants whose later fame eclipsed the magazine itself. Gloria Steinem worked on the magazine in its early years, helping to recruit the celebrities who appeared in its photo features, before going on to co-found Ms. magazine and become a leading figure of the feminist movement. Terry Gilliam served as an assistant editor and contributed artwork and fumetti work; it was at Help! that Gilliam first met John Cleese, a connection that led directly to Gilliam's place as the animator and only American member of Monty Python. The magazine thus functioned as an unlikely crossroads where American satire, British comedy, and 1960s cultural politics briefly shared an office.

A Training Ground for Underground Comix

Help! published fan mail and amateur contributions, and Kurtzman used its pages to test young cartoonists. Among those who appeared were Robert Crumb, whose Fritz the Cat material debuted in the magazine, and Gilbert Shelton, whose Wonder Wart-Hog also debuted there. Jay Lynch, Spain Rodriguez, Skip Williamson, Rand Holmes, and Paul Coker Jr. were among the other young artists who contributed. Within a few years of the magazine's death, Crumb, Shelton, Lynch, Rodriguez, and Williamson became leading figures of the underground comix movement that transformed American comics. Historians of the medium therefore treat Help! as a bridge: an overground, newsstand magazine, edited by the creator of Mad, that quietly incubated the underground generation. Few publications of its modest size have a comparable record as a talent incubator.

Goodman Goes Playboy and the Archie Lawsuit

The magazine's most famous story was also its most troublesome. In the Goodman Beaver story usually known as Goodman Goes Playboy, Kurtzman and Elder parodied the wholesome world of Archie Comics, drawing its familiar teenage characters into an adult satire of the Playboy philosophy. Archie Comics sued Kurtzman and Warren for copyright infringement over the depictions. The case became a celebrated early test of parody's legal limits in American comics publishing, and it burdened the already fragile magazine with legal trouble it could ill afford. Ironically, the story also impressed Hugh Hefner, and the renewed connection with Playboy led to Kurtzman's next long-running feature, the full-color Little Annie Fanny, drawn with Elder for Playboy beginning in 1962, even while Help! was still appearing.

Twenty-Six Issues and a Quiet End

Help! appeared in two volumes. Volume one ran from August 1960 to September 1961 and comprised twelve issues; volume two ran from February 1962 to September 1965 and comprised fourteen more, for a total of twenty-six issues in five years. The irregular schedule reflected the magazine's finances: publication paused and resumed as money allowed, and frequency slipped as the 1960s wore on. Warren Publishing itself was moving toward the black-and-white horror magazines, Creepy and Eerie, that would make the company famous, and a shoestring humor title fit that future poorly. The final issue appeared in September 1965, and the magazine folded without the public drama that had attended the ends of Trump and Humbug. Kurtzman continued with Little Annie Fanny at Playboy for more than two decades.

Reputation and Legacy

Help! was never as polished as Trump, as famous as Mad, or as commercially successful as the Warren horror magazines that followed it, and for years it was the hardest of Kurtzman's magazines to see, since it was not comprehensively reprinted. Yet its reputation has grown steadily among comics historians. It demonstrated what Kurtzman's satire could do with almost no money, preserved his partnership with Will Elder in the Goodman Beaver stories, gave Gloria Steinem and Terry Gilliam formative editorial experience, connected John Cleese to both, and printed the first work of underground comix pioneers. As a directory entry it stands as a small New York magazine with an outsized afterlife: twenty-six cheaply printed issues that sit at the junction of Mad, Monty Python, feminism's magazine history, and the underground movement that remade American comics.