Goodman Beaver
Goodman Beaver is a fictional character who appears in comics created by American cartoonist Harvey Kurtzman.
Goodman is a naive and optimistic Candide-like character, oblivious to the corruption and degeneration around him, and whose stories were vehicles for social satire and pop culture parody.
Goodman first appeared in a story in Harvey Kurtzman's Jungle Book in 1959; the best-remembered were the five strips the Kurtzman–Elder team produced in 1961–62 for the Kurtzman-edited magazine Help!
They tend to be in the parodic style Kurtzman developed when he wrote and edited Mad in the 1950s, but with more pointed, adult-oriented satire and much more refined and detailed artwork on Elder's part, filled with numerous visual gags.
Kurtzman and Elder developed a female version of Goodman Beaver for Playboy magazine called Little Annie Fanny (1962–1988).
[5] Most of the stories were in the parodic style Kurtzman had developed as the creator, editor, and writer of Mad, but dealt with more significant issues concerning modernity.
[8] As an editor hired by Schlock Publications Inc., Goodman loses his youthful idealism when awash in the sea of avarice and selfishness he encounters in the publishing world.
[15] Set against the backdrop of the fall of European colonialism in the face of the rise of African nationalism, such as in the Kenyan Mau-Mau Uprising, and the spread of the Soviet sphere of influence,[15] the story throws a modern 1960s spin on the romance of jungle adventure as exemplified by the Tarzan tales.
[15] Elder's first efforts had Goodman depicted with more monkey-like features—thick, black eyebrows, a large mouth, and small jaw and chin.
[4] "Goodman Goes Playboy" appeared in altered form in the book collection Executive's Comic Book in 1962: in the orgy scene the exposed nipples were covered with white ink [22] and the parody Archie characters were altered to obscure the resemblance to characters they were based on in a failed attempt to escape legal action from Archie's publishers.
Framed within the story of Don Quixote,[5] "Goodman, Underwater" satirizes Cold War tensions[24] and sets out to deflate the deluded ideals of do-gooders[5] while parodying the 1960s television series Sea Hunt,[5] which starred Lloyd Bridges as Mike Nelson.
[28] Goodman Beaver made his first appearance in Harvey Kurtzman's Jungle Book[18] in 1959,[33] in "The Organization Man in the Gray Flannel Executive Suit".
[31] Kurtzman approached Hugh Hefner in 1960 with the idea of a comic strip feature for Playboy that would star Goodman Beaver.
[33]—all the Elder-drawn stories except for "Goodman Goes Playboy", which appeared only in short excerpts permitted by fair use exemptions under US copyright law.
Original artwork for 38 of the 139 reproduced panels were lost; according to Kurtzman, several pages were sent to French magazine Charlie Hebdo for translation and never returned.
publisher Jim Warren received a letter on 6 December 1961 accusing the magazine of copyright infringement and demanding removal of the offending issue from newsstands.
[23] Warren's lawyer believed they could succeed if they fought the suit, but the legal costs would make it a "Pyrrhic victory", and thus recommended settling out of court.
[18] Warren could not have the magazine recalled,[23] but he agreed to pay Archie Comics $1000 and ran a note of apology in a subsequent issue of Help!
[29] Warren's action disappointed Kurtzman, who felt that giving in to such censorship set a "terrible precedent",[18] and amounted to a kind of prostitution.
[18] The strip Kurtzman produced, Little Annie Fanny, is often thought of as a compromise—virtuosic in its visuals, but lacking in content in comparison to the Goodman Beaver stories.
[46] Publisher and critic Gary Groth wrote that Elder's artwork in the Goodman Beaver stories "clinched his reputation as the cartoon Brueghel [sic] with his intricate portraits of a world cheerfully going mad".
[47] Elder considered the stories to be the funniest of his collaborations with Kurtzman,[33] though he said that towards the end of the run he was getting tired of the painstaking work he put into the drawings.
