Harvey Kurtzman's Jungle Book
The social satire in the book's four stories targets Peter Gunn-style private-detective shows, Westerns such as Gunsmoke, capitalist avarice in the publishing industry, Freudian pop psychology, and lynch-hungry yokels in the South.
Kurtzman created the satirical Mad in 1952, but left its publisher EC Comics in 1956 after a dispute over financial control.
Though it was not a financial success, Jungle Book attracted fans and critics for its brushwork, satirical adult-oriented humor, experimental dialogue balloons, and adventurous page and panel designs.
(and Right Back Down)—In Which Are Described in Words and Pictures Businessmen, Private Eyes, Cowboys, and Other Heros All Exhibiting the Progress of Man from the Darkness of the Cave into the Light of Civilization by Means of Television, Wide Screen Movies, the Stone Axe, and Other Useful Arts.
[2] Freed from the length constraints of magazine pieces, Kurtzman was able to make inventive use of page and panel rhythms.
[6] Violence's job is to protect a young, vapid woman named Lolita Nabokov who is being blackmailed over her exam cheating.
"[8] Goodman Beaver is an editor hired by Schlock Publications Inc. During his time there, he loses his youthful idealism and succumbs to the corruption he finds in the publishing world.
[11] At this point in his career, Kurtzman had had several negative experiences with publishers, and he used this story to satirize the corrupting influence of capitalism and power.
[5] In the 1950s, a trend of "adult" Westerns appeared in which characters were given psychological backgrounds to explain their motivations, as in The Left Handed Gun, in which an angst-ridden Billy the Kid gets his revenge after losing his father figure.
[16] One of Kurtzman's favorites, "Decadence Degenerated" is set in a town in the Deep South called Rottenville,[12] where nothing happens until local beauty Honey Lou is found murdered.
A quiet bookworm named Si Mednick is lynched for the murder because, as one of the yokels declares, "You cain not truss [sic][a] a man who reads!
[21] Kurtzman used the book to lampoon humankind's inability or incompetence, its failure to reach its supposed aspirations, and its self-delusion.
[21] The women in the stories are extraordinarily curvaceous[18] and are frequently objectified—although the character Sam in "Decadence Degenerated" avoids being ogled or groped, it is only because she is depicted as repulsive.
Kurtzman was left disillusioned and cynical about the business end of publishing,[22] and with a wife, three children, and a mortgage to take care of,[23] was struggling financially.
[24] In January Kurtzman signed a contract with Ballantine that came with an advance of $1500[25] with a 4% royalty per copy sold;[27] the deadline was 144 pages by May 1, 1959.
[28] When it was published in September 1959,[27] Jungle Book was the first mass-market paperback of original comics content in the United States.
[33] Kitchen Sink Press reprinted Jungle Book in 1986 in a deluxe hardcover format[c][1] with the pages reproduced at the size in which they were drawn.
[37][38] The French translation of this edition, which included a new introduction by Georges Wolinski, was awarded a "Heritage Selection" at the 2018 Angoulême International Comics Festival.
[1] Admirers included pioneering underground cartoonists such as Joel Beck, Denis Kitchen, Jay Lynch, Spain Rodriguez, Gilbert Shelton, Art Spiegelman, Skip Williamson, and Robert Crumb, who wrote "[s]ome of [Kurtzman's] greatest stuff was done in a little Ballantine Book called Harvey Kurtzman's Jungle Book".
[24] In 1962, Kurtzman made another aborted attempt at this form with Marley's Ghost, an adaptation of A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens, a project he had conceived in 1954.
Graphic novels did not start to become widespread until 1978,[43] a year which saw the publication of McGregor and Gulacy's Sabre[44] and Eisner's A Contract with God,[45] the latter a book also made up of four short stories.
