EIFF 2026 – The Mad World of Harvey Kurtzman,
Directed by Bart Simpson,
Featuring Adele Kurtzman, Al Jaffee, Arnold Roth, Art Spiegelman, Denis Kitchen, Gareth Gaudin, James Warren, Karen Green, Matt Groening, Meredith Kurtzman, Nellie Kurtzman, Pete Poplaski, Robert Crumb, Sarah Downs, Sergio Aragones, Terry Gilliam, William Stout

I usually find some interesting documentary work to watch during the Edinburgh International Film Festival, and this year I found one which dovetailed rather nicely with my own passions – comics. A film about a gifted and influential comics creator. That’s two of my favourite things in one, so of course I booked tickets to this Canadian-Scottish production.

For those unfamiliar with his name, Kurtzman was an incredibly inventive comics artist and writer and publisher. Some of his early work would involve a lot of research (despite the fairly fast and cheap nature of the medium at the time) to get details and ideas correct, especially for his war comics. These were not like most other rah-rah, here are our boys, the Good Guys, valiantly facing and vanquishing the Nasty Enemy. For starters these were aimed at much older readers, not kids, and Kurtzman managed to work in an anti-war sensibility while delivering the story, the sort of remarkable trick Pat Mills and Joe Colquhoun would pull off decades later with the influential Charley’s War; no honour and glory antics here, this was war as hell and the effect is had on those who made it back.

Kurtzman started convincing the iconic EC Comics to start looking at new directions, not just their war, crime and horror titles, and his incredibly inventive sense of humour, combined with his distaste for those in authority, would really start to manifest (although some who knew him said this was already apparent when he drew cartoons even at high school). The road to the now-iconic MAD magazine was laid, and entire generations of creative talents would grow up influenced by this.

(restored version of the first MAD Magazine cover)

Simpson assembles some terrific talking heads scenes with people who knew Kurtzman, not least his youngest daughter, Nellie, who is a frequent “anchor” figure through the film, often talking with an old friend of her father’s, and a well-known name in comics circles in his own right, Denis Kitchen, who has carefully archived so much of Kurtzman’s work, and as they go through this material – from published work to personal notes and letters, we get more insight into Kurtzman’s varied output across the decades, while an animation studio took some of the artwork and brought it to a simple but effective form of life, to make it more visually engaging than simply showing a number of static images.

Another framing device used to structure the film is an old Canadian talk-show broadcast with Harvey, which, as director Simpson explained, allowed Harvey, gone now for some decades, to speak for himself about his work and his motivations. Around this and Nellie and Kitchen, we get quite the array of others who knew or worked with Kurtzman, including names from succeeding generations of creatives who would go on to become huge, influential names themselves, such as Art Spiegelman and Robert Crumb, not to mention Terry Gilliam and Matt Groening.

(cover for Help! Magazine number 1, with comedian Sid Caesar on the cover, the first of a string of famous figures who would gladly grace the pages)

Gilliam particularly is full of praise, and not just for the encouragement and work Harvey gave him when he was starting out, in Help! Magazine, but the connections – for a while they were playing with the photo-comic idea, but giving it their own subversive twist. One of the young actors used in such a strip, a man who falls for his daughter’s Barbie doll, was played by a very young John Cleese. As Gilliam notes, if he hadn’t had this comics connection to Cleese through working with Kurtzman, would he have travelled to the UK to become part of Monty Python? Would he have had the film career he had afterwards?

For me one of the warmest parts of this film wasn’t just those who knew or worked with Kurtzman reminiscing about him, it was about the influence, that ineffable effect where someone often doesn’t even know they are doing it, but they are passing on influences to a new generation, who take it and run with it, doing their own new things, which in turn influence more that come after them. With the run on Help! Magazine publishing early works from the likes of Robert Crumb and Gilbert Shelton, who would go on to be pivotal figures in the emerging underground comics scene and the wider counter culture (as indeed did Kurtzman’s work). Or his teaching spell, alongside the equally legendary Will Eisner, at New York’s School of Visual Arts, frequently bringing in established creators as guests to his class.

There’s even a nice segment of Kurtzman in Europe, where his approach to comics and satire for adult readers inspired many in the Franco-Belgian comics scene. It was especially interesting to me as today in English-language countries, although the comics form is treated better than before, most comics creators here envy the way the medium is treated as a proper part of the arts scene in the Franco-Belgian world, so it was interesting to hear of a time when that influence was coming the other way and inspiring creators like Gotlib and Moebius.

(Director Bart Simpson talking with the Edinburgh film fest crowd in the Cameo, after the screening of the Mad World of Harvey Kurtzman, pic from my Flick)

And the nice thing about that influence is that, long after we lose the artist – or for Nellie and her family, they lost a loving father and husband, and too early – is that the influence remains, streamed into newer generations of creators, who in turn influence other, younger, newer creators, and so it goes on, a living influence. A warm-hearted look at not just a great comics creator and humorist, but a creator who genuinely influenced the popular and then the counter cultures (there’s a reason Steven Spielberg paid top dollar for a framed early MAD cover by Kurtzman, now, ironically, worth far more than he ever got paid in his own lifetime); today one of the major comics industry awards is named for Kurtzman, another way his legacy continues.

This review was originally penned for Live For Films