by Tim Pilcher
Elder revamped one of Kurtzman’s earlier creations, Goodman Beaver, from his Jungle Book. Loosely based on Voltaire’s Candide, Goodman Beaver recounted the ongoing misadventures of a naïve everyman experiencing the seamier side of society. The writer/artist team worked on the Beaver strips in Help! magazine (which Elder considered his best) until they received an offer they couldn’t refuse from a certain pajama-clad publisher.
An unpublished Playboy color rough that finally saw print in Elder’s sketchbook, Chicken Fat, published by Fantagraphics in 2006.
Goodman Gets a Gun by Harvey Kurtzman and Will Elder, from Help! #16 from 1962. Typically, the gags are set around the guys acting ga-ga about the gals. Look carefully at the background and you can even see Little Leaguers climbing a tree to check out the honeys!
LITTLE ANNIE FANNY
Kurtzman and Elder’s trials and tribulations at Warren Publishing had left them despondent and looking for work. Always trying to help his buddy out, Hefner suggested that Kurtzman create a strip for Playboy. As the magazine’s then executive editor, Ray Russell, wrote to the MAD creator in 1960: “Both Hef and I strongly feel there is great value in the comic strip form. Comic strips have a basic, immediate appeal to many levels of readership.”
Recalling Elder and Kurtzman’s earlier Goodman Beaver parody of Playboy, the latter wrote to Hefner suggesting a female version of the character for a strip in Playboy. After six weeks, Hef got back to his old friend, writing, “I think your notion of doing a Goodman Beaver strip of two, three, or four pages, but using a sexy girl… is a bull’s-eye. We can run it every issue.”
The strip’s name went through numerous changes, from The Perils of Zelda and The Perils of Irma to The Perils of Sheila and Little Mary Mixup, before finally settling on Little Annie Fanny. The latter title was inspired by Harold Gray’s hugely popular newspaper strip, Little Orphan Annie, and Kurtzman and Elder’s creation would frequently satirize the Gray stories.
Little Annie Fanny was a sexy, voluptuous, female incarnation of Voltaire’s Candide, and Elder knew exactly how she should look: “I suggested Marilyn Monroe and Brigitte Bardot. They both were cutie pies and they’re very, very sensuous. A girl like Jane Russell is a little too masculine, if you ask me… But Marilyn Monroe had that sensual innocence. She was like a sexy child. She would appeal to most anyone.”
Hefner later described the Little Annie Fanny strips as “some of the farthest-out, most beautifully executed episodes of the zaniest, lushest, most unique cartoon feature ever conceived.” And certainly the quality ranks among the best erotic comics work ever published. Not only did Kurtzman and Elder work on the series, but notable artistic geniuses like Jack Davis, Frank Frazetta, Russ Heath, William Stout, and Al Jaffee also contributed.
Little Annie Fanny first appeared in the October 1962 edition of Playboy and ran—albeit erratically—107 stories over an impressive 26 years, making it the longest-running erotic strip in America. With its mix of quality, sophistication, and sexy imagery, Little Annie Fanny showed that U.S. erotic comics had finally come of age.
Will Elder was a big Sherlock Holmes fan and was commissioned to do this watercolour in 1987, which was also turned into a collectable art print.
This stunning mermaid painting was done in 1988 for a contact of Harvey Kurtzman’s, but despite his initials being on the bottom, Will Elder painted this solo.
This sketch of a saucy redhead was for a possible background character in Little Annie Fanny, but was ultimately not used.
PHOEBE ZEIT-GEIST
Three years after Little Annie Fanny was launched, black-humorist and writer-provocateur Michael O’Donoghue came up with his Adventures of Phoebe Zeit-Geist comic strip. The series first appeared in 1965 in the Evergreen Review magazine—a beatnik mélange of literary writings whose impressive big-name contributors included Albert Camus, Bertolt Brecht, Samuel Beckett, Charles Bukowski, William Burroughs, Jack Kerouac, Norman Mailer, Vladimir Nabokov, Harold Pinter, Susan Sontag, Tom Stoppard, and Malcolm X.
The comic strip recounted the scantily clad adventures of debutante Phoebe Zeit-Geist as she was repeatedly kidnapped and rescued by a series of bizarre characters, including Eskimos, Nazis, Chinese foot fetishists, and lesbian assassins. The concept acted as a successful parody of the damsel-in-distress stories so prevalent in comics, men’s magazines, and pulp fiction at the time. But, unlike its innocently bawdy contemporaries, Phoebe Zeit-Geist had a darker, occasionally brutal edge, with scenes of bondage depicted as torture rather than Bettie Page playfulness.
Writer O’Donoghue also contributed to the satirical magazine National Lampoon (where he wrote the comic Tarzan of the Cows), and the continuing feature Underwear for the Deaf. He was also the editor and main contributor to Lampoon’s Encyclopedia of Humor and became the first head writer of NBC’s groundbreaking TV comedy series Saturday Night Live.
The strip’s artist, Frank Springer, was already a well-established comic penciller and inker, having worked for all the major companies at the time, including Marvel and DC Comics.
Phoebe Zeit-Geist only ran for a year, ending in 1966, but as one of the first sexually oriented comics to feature in mainstream media, it inspired the nascent underground comix scene to go even farther.
Springer followed Zeit-Geist with Frank Fleet, another strip for Evergreen Review, between 1969-70, and when the magazine folded he moved to National Lampoon, working under the pseudonyms Francis Hollidge and Bob Monhegan. In 2004, Springer remained pragmatic about his comic book career: “There were some raggedy times, but I always had work, raised five kids, bought some houses, bought some cars… I’ve been lucky.”
In the Evergreen Review, Frank Springer’s drawings originally had just a single color added to the artwork.
Springer was a master draftsman, as his sense of composition and lighting reveal.
The collected edition of Phoebe Zeit-Geist featured this spectacular cover by Springer.
THE ADVENTURES OF PUSSYCAT
The Adventures of Pussycat was a risqué, black-and-white comic strip feature that ran in various Martin Goodman magazines in the 1960s. Eight of the bawdy, but non-pornographic, tongue-in-cheek secret agent episodes were collected in a one-shot, black-and-white comic book in October 1968, including a brand new story.
Most of the creative talent came from Goodman’s sister company, Marvel Comics, including writer/editor Stan Lee, Larry Lieber, and Ernie Hart. Lee’s signature style of writing is stamped all over one strip entitled The Cavortin’ Case Of The Booby-Trapped Bra. The artist list was an impressive roster led by Wally Wood, Al Hartley, Bill Ward, Jim Mooney, and Bill Everett, who drew the cover. The Adventures of Pussycat was a deliberate attempt to cash in on the success of Kurtzman and Elder’s Little Annie Fanny, as well as Wood’s own 1968-1974 series, Sally Forth, that he produced for U.S. military publications.
Wood drew the 1965 Pussycat premiere—a parody of The Man From U.N.C.L.E and other popular spy TV shows of the time—in which Pussycat, a secretary for S.C.O.R.E. (Secret Council Of Ruthless Extroverts) is recruited to fight the agency’s enemy—L.U.S.T.
The magazine had a profound effect on 15-year-old cartoonist Fred Hembeck, who would later work for Stan Lee. As Hembeck fondly recalled, “The whole Pussycat enterprise is dated to be sure. And yeah, you could easily argue it’s sexist as well—exploitative even—but never mean-spirited.”
Bill Ward’s unmistakable style shines through in this strip.
This painted cover by Bill Everett set the tone of the magazine—”This lady is a swinger!”
Pussycat’s character owes more than a nod to Playboy’s Little Annie Fanny.
Ward’s archetypal stocking-clad Pussycat would have been at home in any of his gag cartoons.
WALLY WOOD
Wally Wood was a truly professional comic artist with a pedigree similar to that of Will Elder or Jack Davis. All had worked together at E.C. on various titles, including MAD, under Harvey Kurtzman. Wood described w
orking with the legendary writer/editor on the E.C. titles in 1972: “I quit working for Harvey twice… Harvey had a very annoying way of criticizing your work… He’s never easy to work for… I like Harvey and I respect him, but he’s a hard man… he’s a tyrant! He’s gotta have everything his way, which I suppose I admire in a way, too.”
Like fellow comic artists Cole and Bill Ward, by the mid-1950s Wood had grown cynical of the comic book industry, and went over to men’s magazines, drawing softcore sex cartoons for Playboy, Cavalcade, Dude, and The Gent. But, come the ’60s, the artist was feeling restless and unappreciated. A lifelong alcoholic, his drinking worsened and his marriage was in trouble. He grew frustrated and was starting to lose control, suffering from terrible migraines that he called his “never-ending headache.”
But despite all these millstones, he still managed to produce quality work. In 1967, he created a strip called Pipsqueak Papers for his self-published Witzend magazine, featuring a sexy elf named Nudine, obviously reveling in rendering her in all her naked glory. That same year, Wood drew the satirical Disneyland Memorial Orgy poster for Paul Krassner’s The Realist magazine. Krassner got the idea from Walt Disney’s death in 1966: “It occurred to me that Disney was God to Mickey Mouse, Donald Duck, Goofy—the whole crowd. He had been their creator and had repressed their baser instincts, but now they could shed all their inhibitions and participate in a magnificent mass binge.”
Krassner released a larger version as a poster, initially selling several thousand copies, but the original art was stolen from the printer. The poster depicted the vast pantheon of Disney characters fucking, while Mickey Mouse mainlined heroin and huge dollar signs radiated from Cinderella’s castle. Wood’s unsigned panoramic scene is reminiscent of William Hogarth’s 18th century moralistic satires such as Gin Lane, and work by Hieronymus Bosch. Wood had the same problems as Hogarth regarding copyright, too: “I’d rather not say anything about that! It was the most pirated drawing in history! Everyone was printing copies of that and I understand some people got busted for selling it. I always thought Disney stuff was pretty sexy… Snow White, etc.”
The usually litigious Disney strangely didn’t chase Krassner or The Realist, but did sue Sam Ridge, the publisher of a bootleg, ultraviolet, color version of the poster.
Wood was an influence on the underground cartoonists of the late ’60s and almost certainly inspired works like Robert Crumb’s tableau, Grand Opening Of The Great Intercontinental Fuck-In and Orgy-Riot, from Snatch Comics #1 in 1973.
Following the Disney controversy, Wood recalled in an interview that “it all started in 1968, when I was asked to do a complete comic section for a proposed tabloid newspaper for servicemen—four pages of full-color, service-oriented humor strips… There was a high-flying lowlife named Wild Bill Yonder, a couple of others that for some reason escape my memory… and one that I felt, and still feel, had a great name for a comic heroine… Sally Forth.”
Sally Forth duly appeared in Military News, a 16-page tabloid for the U.S. armed forces, and Wood’s sexy action-adventure heroine—like her contemporary, Phoebe Zeit-Geist—appeared mostly nude in the strip.
A cheeky version of Alice in Wonderland by Wally Wood, with Sally Forth in the title role.
Wally Wood’s covers for the first Sally Forth collections were little more than montages of interior art.
Internal pages from the French edition of Sally Forth. Note the visual puns and innuendo, with the Cheshire cat disappearing and leaving a vagina rather than a smile, and the phallic mushrooms in the final panel.
Despite his moderate successes, Wood began drinking more to dull the pain of his headaches—but it only made things worse. Eventually it began to affect his art, and then his wife of 19 years, Tatjana, divorced him in 1969. Wood remarried within a year, but it didn’t last.
After Military News folded, Sally Forth returned on July 26, 1971, in Overseas Weekly, a tabloid for U.S. soldiers serving outside America. Wood—this time assisted by writer-artists Nick Cuti, Paul Kirchner, and Larry Hama—produced new adventures for his commando heroine for almost three years, until the strip was canceled again on April 22, 1974.
An embittered Wood now began producing hardcore strips and covers for Al Goldstein’s notorious sex paper Screw and its various spinoffs. Wood’s move toward X-rated material wasn’t a huge surprise—back in the ’50s his lush women threatened by menacing aliens were classic “damsel-in-distress” cheesecake, and a popular aspect of his science-fiction art. But now, Wood’s work for Screw had a mean, misogynist edge. The story Malice in Wonderland appeared in The National Screw’s first issue in 1976 and was an X-rated parody of the classic Lewis Carroll story. One uncomfortable scene gleefully depicts a female character being violently battered and sexually violated. Clearly Wood was exorcising his demons on the page, having gone through his second divorce in less than five years.
By 1979, Wally almost exclusively produced pornographic work, culminating in Sally Forth stories featuring Sally and Bill Yonder in three issues of the adult comic magazine Gang Bang. While the first story is artistically comparable to his previous work on the strip, the second reveals his health problems; the art is weaker and the gags are repeated from earlier work. The third issue of Gang Bang was published posthumously.
Ultimately, in a frank and painful editorial, Wood had to confess to his fans that he was no longer able to work: “The reasons I had to call it quits were (1) I had no help. I was doing everything myself and (2) I’ve had some bad luck… my kidneys are failing, my blood pressure is up, I’ve had three minor strokes so my left eye and left hand are fairly useless.”
Bill Pearson was with Wood almost to the end. “I started with him as a ghost writer, assistant editor, became his friend, then his letterer and general assistant. Ended up his parent… telling him ‘no’ more often than ‘yes’ when he wanted to do something self-destructive… For all his faults, I loved the man.” Sometime between Halloween and November 3, 1981, Wally Wood took a .44 caliber pistol from his collection, placed it to his right temple, and squeezed the trigger.
Bill Pearson reformatted Woods’ Sally Forth strips into a series of comics published by Eros Comix between 1993 and 1995, and three years later, Pearson edited the entire run into a single 160-page volume.
Wood cleverly played with readers’ perceptions. Note how in panels one and five it looks as if Sally is performing fellatio, but is in fact eating a fruit. The gag is based around the Alice in Wonderland story, but instead of Sally’s whole body growing or shrinking, it’s only her breasts that undergo the transformation.
OH, WICKED WANDA!
Oh, Wicked Wanda! started life in Penthouse magazine as a text story written by established author Frederic Mullally in September 1969. The story was initially accompanied by a single Brian Forbes illustration, but Penthouse publisher Bob Guccione—like Hugh Hefner—always had a penchant for comics, and it wasn’t long before the stories mutated into a strip feature, this time illustrated by British comic legend Ron Embleton. Embleton was a highly respected comic artist famous for his Wulf the Briton newspaper strip and work on The Trigan Empire in Look & Learn. He painstakingly created a different painting for each page of the Wanda strip and was an excellent caricaturist.
The team worked well together, and recounted the story of 19-year-old Wanda Von Kreesus—the beautiful brunette heiress to a multimillion-dollar fortune and a “man-hating” lesbian. She lived in an old castle on Lake Zurich, Switzerland, and ran a bank that contained secrets that could destroy all the world’s governments. Candyfloss, Wanda’s love interest, was a 16-year-old blonde nymphet who was originally sent as a “present” to Wanda’s father. Wanda had her father chase Candyfloss around the castle, and when he died of exhaustion Wanda claimed her inheritance.
Their ludicrously sexy and farcical adventures took them across the globe to Arabia, Tibet, India, and Disneyland, and even included time travel. Interestingly for the period, the central protagonists—Wanda a
nd Candyfloss—were extremely liberated and strong, and didn’t require men for anything, except to occasionally abuse.
Frederic Mullally believed that men usually admired women who are smart enough to know what they want and strong enough to get it, and reflected this in his writing. Throughout her adventures, Wanda was assisted by numerous aides, including her elite army of “butch-dikes” (the Puss International Force); mad, masochistic ex-Nazi scientist Homer Sapiens; and the Neanderthal-like “chief jailer” and master torturer J. Hoover Grud (a thinly veiled reference to FBI founder J. Edgar Hoover)
Oh, Wicked Wanda! was crammed with in-jokes and references to popular culture and current affairs. Many politicians were caricatured in the strip, including a drenched Ted Kennedy wearing a ’76 Presidential campaign ribbon and holding a steering wheel. The whole “joke” referred to Kennedy driving off the Chappaquiddick Bridge and killing his companion, Mary Jo Kopechne.
Embleton’s cover to the Oh, Wicked Wanda! collection in 1975.
Wanda’s first visual renderings were by Brian Forbes, in stylized illustrations accompanying Frederic Mullally’s text stories.
An Oh, Wicked Wanda! strip from Penthouse, July 1979, shows Embleton’s skills at portraying female anatomy.
The constant appearance of the Senator in the strip soon wore thin, but other politicos satirized included Richard Nixon, Charles de Gaulle, Fidel Castro, Henry Kissinger, and Mao Tse-tung. Cultural icons such as Bob Hope, John Wayne, W.C. Fields, Humphrey Bogart, Marilyn Monroe, Laurel and Hardy, Muhammad Ali, Salvador Dalí, and Lee Marvin were also lambasted.