Help! (magazine)

"Help!" (1960-1965) was a magazine published by James Warren. It was
Harvey Kurtzman's longest-running magazine project after leaving "Mad" and EC Publications, and during its five years of operation it was always chronically underfunded, yet innovative. James Warren was also publishing successful monster-movie and horror comics magazines simultaneously.

For the magazine, Kurtzman has brought along several artists from his "Mad" collaborations, including Will Elder, Jack Davis, John Severin and Al Jaffee.

Kurtzman's assistants over the run of the magazine included a young Terry Gilliam and a young Gloria Steinem; the latter was apparently very helpful in gathering the celebrity comedians who would appear on the covers of each issue, as well as occasionally to serve as actor/models in the fumetti strips the magazine ran along with more traditional comics and text pieces. Among the then little-known performers in the fumetti were John Cleese, Woody Allen and Milt Kamen; better-known performers such as Orson Bean were also known to participate. Some fumetti scripts were by Bernard Shir-Cliff.

At "Help!" Gilliam met Cleese for the first time, resulting in their collaboration years later on "Monty Python's Flying Circus". Cleese appeared in a Gilliam fumetto, "Christopher's Punctured Romance" about a man who is shocked to learn that his daughter's new "Barbee" doll has "titties" but falls in love with and has an affair with the doll. Gilliam himself would appear on two covers of Help! , and along with the rest of the creative team ,appeared in "crowd scenes" in several fumettis.

The magazine introduced young talents who went on to influential careers in underground comix as well as the mainstream: among them Robert Crumb, Gilbert Shelton, and Jay Lynch. Algis Budrys and other science fiction writers were regular contributors of prose and scripts to the magazine.

Working with a minimal budget, Kurtzman relied on a combination of cheap up-and-coming talent, favors called in to "name" friends (such as cover poses by Jackie Gleason, Mort Sahl, or Jerry Lewis) and inexpensive page-fillers (such as inserting dialogue balloons into news photos and publicity stills).

Somewhat more adult and risque than "Mad", "Help!" was nonetheless less sexually explicit or taboo-breaking than the contemporaneous "The Realist" or the later underground comix and "National Lampoon" were or would be. Nonetheless it had its moments, and served as a locus and starting point for a wide range of talent.