Fabulous Harvey Kurtzman collection

Joey Anuff tells the story of how he came into possession of a giant treasure trove of Harvey Kurtzman original art. (Kurtzman is best known as the founder of Mad and creator of the Little Annie Fanny comic strip that ran in Playboy.)

Here's an excerpt:

Take a look at the scan gallery I've assembled below and you'll get a sense of what Denis showed us: the virgin files of the Harvey Kurtzman Estate. A publisher's estate spanning three publications -- Trump, Humbug, and Help! -- and an artist's estate rich in work from the least-familiar, most mature decade of his career, roughly 1955-1965.

Picture setting your grubby eyes and paws on all that Holy Grail material -- not just the stuff below but also roughs and finals for seemingly every Humbug page, the entire Jungle Book minus the cover, a pile of amazing Annie breakdowns, among other lost treasures -- and not instantly scheming ways to smuggle it home. As a graduate of both the late-'90s tech bubble and the late-'80s comics boom, and as a market-averse twenty-something in search of a safe haven for his chumpy change, it wasn't long before I'd convinced myself that in the Kurtzman Estate, I was finally looking, at long last, at a 401(k) I could actually believe in.

Superyachtsman (and VC) Tom Perkins is said to have made his motto "When you have a great opportunity, push all the chips, all the resources that you can, to the center of the table." Something along those lines (more likely, something about Greatest Fools) became my motto that summer as Denis and I inched through terms. And after some no-nonsense pricing on my part, a nice meeting with Adele Kurtzman herself at the '99 San Diego Comic Con, and a thorough hi-res digitization by the Kitchen Art Agency, I finally became the tingly-toed owner of approximately 40 lbs. of blue-chip comic book art.

Joey's Harvey Kurtzman collection

• [CliffStoll]

  The chosen 3 images are from a Hexaflexagon! Quite popular in the late 1950′s (wasn’t Richard Feynman and John Tukey on the Flexagon committee in 1940)

• [JOEY ANUFF]

  @ CLIFFSTOLL: I wrote that article! It was difficult to reverse-engineer the flexagon out of the remains of the project, I must say. Even after writing that piece, I didn’t really get it until this summer when I finally saw videos of flexagons in action on YouTube. Sometime soon, I’ll get a video of the Kurtzman flexagon made.

  @ WOLFIESMA: We talked about that while we were sifting through the collection, actually. There was some debate as to whether he’d been ripped off — I think it had turned out to be a problem house in some regards — and this was all before Crumb prices got really insane, anyways. If I’d only had a little more cabbage to my name, I’d have tried to get the Crumb sketchbook Denis did have: the Harlem Sketchbook he did for Kurtzman’s Help! in 1965. Even in ’99, Crumb was getting out of my price range, though.

• [CliffStoll]

  A quick search reveals that yes, indeed, Harvey Kurtzman did Hexaflexagon comics! See

  http://www.comicartmagazine.com/archive-issue7sect2.php

  which shows his Hexaflexagon – Telescope the Moon!

• [wolfiesma]

  I’m reminded of the scene in Crumb where he sells a suitcase of drawings for a villa in the south of France. Valuable indeed!

• [Falcon_Seven]

  I have always been jealous of those who could draw the female form with the emphasis on the parts that I find so attractive.

• [buddy66]

  Of all the talents that made up MAD, Kurtzman was IMO the true genius of the bunch. Harvey made a great investment. It’s like owning a trunk full of diamonds.