For some reason the English remaindered bookstore at the top of Kalverstraat has not just been well stocked with comics trades and hardcovers –I managed to snag some forty Marvel Essential collections there– but with Fantagraphics’ published books. Over the years this has enabled me to buy a hell of a lot of books I could’ve never afforded at full price, the latest example being the beautiful hardcover slipcase collection of Humbug. Originally published at sixty dollars and with Dutch comics prices usually translated one for one dollars into euros, it was now a steal at twenty euros — and they still have some copies left.
Humbug was Harvey Kurtzman’s second attempt at creating a new, improved Mad, after the Playboy published Trump, a slick expensive full colour magazine that only lasted two issues before Hefner pulled the plug. Somehow Kurtzman managed to persuade his collaborators — Will Elder, Jack Davis, Al Jaffee, Arnold Roth and Wally Wood (but only for the first issue)– to try again, but this time be their own publishers. The end result was Humbug, much more political and grownup than Mad or Trump ever were, but again not commercially succesful, which meant it folded after eleven issues. Kurtzman would try one last time, with Help, which lasted slightly longer: twentysix issues.
To say that this is a handsome collection or that this contains some brilliant satire by cartoonists at the peak of their power is to state the obvious. So let’s not. More interesting is what it feels like to finally hold a collection of such a legendary comics in your hands after having read about it for years, if not decades. These comics had been out of print since the late fifties, with the only way to see even a glimpse of them through reading books on comics history. For me, it was Les Daniels’ early seventies book Comix: A History of Comics Books in America that gave me that first look, together with so many more other classic comics books that I never would be able to see in their complete form, because who was going to reprint these ancient and almost forgotten treasures?
It’s only been the last decade or so that there have been enough publishers mining American comics history that you can be certain almost everything of any interest has been or will be reprinted. But that was not the case when I first got into yankee comics and for most stuff the only realistic option was to read about them, rather than read them. Having something as wonderful as a hardcover reprint of Humbug, something I’ve read about for decades, still amazes me.