This is going to be a toughie to share with you. It’s going to be hard to write anything about HELP! magazine and do it justice. You really need to find a complete run and look at the whole thing to truly understand how important this magazine was to American graphic design history. Just for starters, without it we may never have had underground comics.
Harvey Kurtzman ran HELP! after he quit MAD (the magazine he created) over a salary dispute. He dragged most of the pool of talent with him and shopped around and hooked up with James Warren (Famous Monsters, After Hours, Creepy, etc.). There seemed to be like minds at work in this union. Photos of these guys together look like kindred bachelor spirits—pure hi-fi, martinis, and broads. So it was an interesting fit.
Harvey brought along his good pal Harry Chester (the guy who was the designer of MAD and also of Famous Monsters), so he was likely the connecting point between some of these folks. Harvey also brought along his young assistant, a floating illustrator/cartoonist named Terry Gilliam. Kurtzman hired a talented young journalist named Gloria Steinem. And that was just for starters.
HELP! was an “adult humor” sort of magazine that relied heavily upon contributions from readership and pioneered a style of humor called “fumetti.”
It was a comic strip of sorts, using actual photographs taken on location with live performers depicting the scenes of each panel instead of an illustration. The writers would later come in and add word balloons to tell the story dialog. It was a style of humor that was extremely popular around this time (the early 1960s), with many small humor books where celebrity photos would be paired with word balloons as gag panels. One such title was Who said that!?! and another popular title was Look Who’s Talking. You get the picture. It was also a technique that lost its humorous novelty very quickly and soon died out.
One of the really fascinating and rather stunning things about these fumetti projects was the talent they managed to bring in to their stories. Harvey Kurtzman’s reputation and Gloria Steinem’s connections brought in the very coolest of established humorists (Sid Caesar, Ernie Kovacs, Steve Allen, Dick Van Dyke, even Jerry Lewis), and then the coolest underground hip young unknowns, and later huge stars like Mort Sahl, Lenny Bruce, Woody Allen, and even a very young John Cleese.
This is the cover of issue number one of HELP! It features the legendary Sid Caesar (who at that time was one of the most famous men in entertainment history). Note the delicious headline typography—pure Harry Chester! I wish I could show you more, but I gave away my collection of HELP! to an archivist and art historian who was desperately looking for a set of them. I figured it was where it belonged.
