As we all know, a man named Harvey Kurtzman and a talented crew of artists created the original MAD comic book which later morphed into a hugely successful humor magazine. Kurtzman and most of those artists left after a little more than two dozen issues and went on to do a slicker humor magazine for Hugh Hefner's company. It was called Trump and it lasted a big two issues. This was in the early days of Playboy and Hef was not yet financially stable enough to endure the cost overruns and disappointing early sales of Trump.
Finding themselves out on the street, Kurtzman and his artists decided to start yet another humor mag, this time financing it out of their own pockets. I guess it seemed like a good idea at the time…and it might have been, had they known how to publish. Instead, they designed their new magazine, Humbug, as a cheap package — comic-book sized but without the interior color and with a higher price tag than comic books of the day. The smaller size ensured the magazine would be placed on the comic book racks, not over near magazines of similarly adult appeal…so potential buyers couldn't find it at their newsstands. That is, if it even got to their newsstands. Another grand mistake was to hook up with a particularly weak (and perhaps not totally honest) distributor. The whole thing was a disaster that lasted all of eleven issues.
So did they do anything right? Yes. They filled the pages of Humbug with brilliantly witty stories illustrated by top artists like Bill Elder and Jack Davis. If you could find it, you probably loved it…but not many people had the chance to read Humbug.
This has changed. Fantagraphics Books has just released a superb two-volume boxed set that reprints Humbug in full, plus it also contains proper introductions and interviews with some who worked on the magazine. The material is excellent. It's Kurtzman, Elder, Davis, Al Jaffee, Arnold Roth and a few others working at the peak of their awesome powers. The package is excellent. It's well-designed and well-printed, and I can't think of a way in which it could have been improved. We've seen a lot of fancy comic book reprint projects lately but this may be my favorite.
Buy it. Just buy it.