Harvey Kurtzman – DarylCagle.com

Here’s a memory about Playboy Magazine, from our brilliant cartoonist, Randy Enos.

About 6 years into my tenure at Playboy magazine, they decided to start a comic strip section in the back pages. They already had a strip called Little Annie Fanny by Harvey Kurtzman that had been running for a while and they were keeping that separate from the “Playboy Funnies” which was to be the name of this new feature. They asked me to think of an idea for a strip. They said I could even have a couple of strips if I wanted, so, I started working on some ideas. The first thing that appealed to me was the idea of maybe doing an “old fashioned” looking strip, perhaps modeled after some of my favorites like “Polly And Her Pals” by the great Cliff Sterrett or Harry Hershfield’s, “Abie the Agent”. I tried a few of these amounting to about half a dozen samples and Hugh Hefner picked two. They would alternate, one in each issue.

The first one which I called “5 Cent Mary” derived its moniker from a person I knew of from my youth in New Bedford, Massachusetts. She was a legendary prostitute who worked the fishing piers and dives down in the cobblestoned streets of the city’s wharves. I actually met her once when my father and I were in a diner very early in the morning having breakfast before going fishing. For some reason, I don’t remember how, I knew who she was… maybe my father told me later. Anyway, she sat down beside me and said, “Haven’t I seen you in church?” I think I told her that I didn’t go to church. That was my brief encounter with the famous “5 Cent Mary.” I wish she could have known that I memorialized her in a Playboy comic strip. She probably would have enjoyed that.

I decided that my “5 Cent Mary” would be a street hooker of the late 1800’s and that I would do it in linocut (the medium that I used for my illustrations) to give it a different look than all the other strips. Hefner loved it. Unbeknownst to me, his favorite cartoonist was John Held Jr. and, while I knew little of Held’s work at the time and hadn’t even thought about him when I created Mary, if you do a cartoon in linocut and you draw it in 19^thcentury setting and costuming – BINGO, you get a John Held looking comic strip whether you like it or not! Hefner agreed with me that it should be the only strip in the Funnies section in black and white. He always loved it even when I had some pretty bad gags.

On two occasions, Hefner scribbled a little suggestion for me. One was for “Reg’lar Rabbit” where he drew a suggested expression for the rabbit and the other was on Mary where he suggested a little figure to fill an awkward space I had left in one panel.

The other cartoon he picked was “Reg’lar Rabbit”. My character was a horny little Farmer Brown-type of country hick who was always chasing the ladies. Reg’lar was drawn in a simple conventional pen and ink style with the addition of adhesive color. Doing “Reg’lar” was a nice break in my normal lino-cut illustration activity for the next 6 years.

A wonderful woman named Michelle Urry (who died young, unfortunately) was much beloved by the Playboy cartoonists’ community and was our contact with Playboy in the New York office. The strips and the gag cartoons for the magazine were collected up by her and taken to Chicago once a month where she would go over everything with Hef, who was always the final word on cartoons. On two occasions, he scribbled a little suggestion for me. One was for “Reg’lar Rabbit” where he drew a suggested expression for the rabbit and the other was on Mary where he suggested a little figure to fill an awkward space I had left in one panel. I’ve kept these crude little “notes” all these years. After all, how many people have an original Hugh Hefner cartoon?

Some of the other cartoonists that did strips included Bobby London, Chris Browne, Art Spielgelman, Lou Brooks, Jay Lynch, Mort Gerberg and more..

One year, we cartoonists were all invited to a special Playboy cartoonists’ party at the Drake Hotel in New York. I first met my long-time friend Elwood Smith at that party. As the evening wore on and the drinking accelerated to a spectacular pace, an odd thing happened in a side room in the suite. Michelle Urry had gone in there and came out screaming, “Are you all crazy… what is wrong with you???”

Well, I hadn’t been in that room so I rushed in to see what it was all about, and there my eyes beheld an amazing sight. All over the smooth, pristine, pale, muted walls of the sedate hotel room, several cartoonists had profusely, and I mean PROFUSELY scribbled cartoons with ball-point pens.

Some of them were pretty darn good, too!

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Here’s young Randy with his buddy, Elwood Smith. (I’ve always been a big Elwood Smith fan too –Daryl)

Read more more of Randy’s cartooning memories:

Art School Days in the Whorehouse

The Card Trick that Caused a Divorce

The Mysterious Mr. Quist

Monty Python Comes to Town

Riding the Rails

The Pyramid of Success

The Day I Chased the Bus

The Other Ol’ Blue Eyes

8th Grade and Harold von Schmidt

Rembrandt of the Skies

The Funniest Man I’ve Ever Known

Read “I’m Your Bunny, Wanda –Part One”

Read “I’m Your Bunny, Wanda –Part Two”

Famous Artists Visit the Famous Artists School

Randy Remembers Tomi Ungerer

Randy’s Overnight Parade

The Bullpen

Famous Artists Schools

Dik Browne: Hot Golfer

Randy and the National Lampoon

Randy’s Only Great Idea

A Brief Visit to Outer Space

Enos, Love and Westport

Randy Remembers the National Cartoonists Society

I grew up admiring my buddy, Randy Eno’s work in The National Lampoon when I was in high school and college. Here’s another Randy flashback. See Randy’s editorial cartoon archive here. –Daryl

One of the really big features I did for The National Lampoon was the spoof on the Monty Python television show. It was about an 8 page spread with lots of funny bits illustrated by me imitating the style of the Python animator Terry Gilliam, the only American in the troupe. To hold the 6 or 8 pages of the spread together, I thought of the idea of a long python snake running along the bottom third of the pages continuing on through the whole feature. In keeping with the idea of imitating Gilliam’s style, I decided to do the snake with an airbrush. The only problem was that I had never used an airbrush before and didn’t have one. So, I borrowed the tool from an illustrator friend who loaned me an old one she had. As I proceeded through the long rendition of the python, the faulty, old airbrush would occasionally spit and sputter creating little blobs in my otherwise nice clean “Gilliam-like” smooth airbrush style. So, everywhere a little blob or spot appeared I’d paint in a bush or shrub to cover the mistake. Needless to say, there were a lot of little bushes and shrubs in my picture.

The rest of the pages were decorated with merciless crtiques of Gilliam’s cut-and -paste, crude, rough style. I portrayed the Queen employing Scotch taped photos of her along with fatuous British-types in an exaggerated, blotchy, messy parody of his hurried, short-hand animation style. I remember putting in the line “when in doubt, draw the queen”.

It came to pass, a short time after this parody was published that Mike Gross, the art director, left the Lampoon to start his own graphic design studio. One of the projects he tackled was a book on the Python folks. When that project was over, the Pythons had come to New York and were doing a stage show at Town Hall. Gilliam, who was always absent from the TV version of the show because he had all he could do with creating the visual parodies that peppered the show, was for the first time performing along with his colleagues in the sketches that TV viewers were familiar with.

Mike decided to have a party to celebrate the completion of the book plus their show in New York. The party was held in a loft; hotdogs, were supplied by a Sabrett wagon, complete with umbrella, parked in a corner of the loft. Besides the Python people, the guests included Gilda Radner, John Belushi, Peter Boyle and others.

I had terrors of running into Terry Gilliam, who I had made so much fun of in the Lampoon spread that I decided that I would avoid him at all costs. It wasn’t to be, however, because I was standing right in front of the elevator when it decided to disgorge, along with others, Harvey Kurtzman with Gilliam in tow. I tried to hide but Kurtzman, who knew me (I don’t remember how he knew me) blurted out, “Randy, I want you to meet Terry Gilliam.” I was dead.

Gilliam shook my hand and said, “Hey, man, I love that parody you did on me in the Lampoon!” While my wife discussed acting with Belushi, I discussed cartooning with Gilliam. At one point he asked if I had kids. I told him I had two boys. He then invited my wife and I and the boys to come to see the Python show at the Town Hall. He asked me to see him after the show and he’d take us all back stage to show us all the Python gear.

A million years later when Terry had become the famous director of Fisher King, Time Bandits and my all-time favorite, Brazil, an actor friend of ours was playing one of the doctors in Gilliam’s 12 Monkeys. I asked my friend to say hello to Terry for me the next time he was on the set with him. Later on, I ran into this actor and asked if he had done so. He said, “Randy, I am VERY impressed. I told Terry you said hello and he said that you were his favorite cartoonist!”

–Randy Enos

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