LITTLE ANNIE FANNY MEETS CONAN

As well known today as it is, Harvey Kurtzman and Will Elder's LITTLE ANNIE FANNY has not been a favorite of some critics over the years. Despite the crisp writing and meticulous art the naysayers maintain that it isn't their best work, citing Hugh Hefner's "helicopter editing" as the main reason. Others believe it was the pinnacle of the Kurtzman/Elder partnership. Whatever the viewpoint, it is really the most extreme (and sexy) moment in the evolution of MAD magazine.

As the founder of the world's greatest humor magazine (now a light gray shadow of its former self), Kurtzman was lured by Hef to publish a humor magazine of his own under the HMH Publications (aka Playboy) imprint. Kurtzman bailed from MAD and took a parcel of its talent with him including Elder, Jack Davis, Al Jaffe, Wally Wood and Russ Heath. The first issue of TRUMP hit the above-the-counter stands with a cover date of January 1957. It tanked after the second issue when Hef pulled it because of financial problems he was having at the time. Another humor 'zine, HUMBUG, followed thereafter but didn't gain any traction (while MAD cruised along nicely, thank you very much).

After corresponding with Hefner over a period of time and getting an endorsement from executive editor Ray Russell, Kurtzman and his pal Will Elder landed the LITTLE ANNIE FANNY stint. It lasted for 107 issues from October 1962 to September 1988.

In an interview with THE COMICS JOURNAL, Russ Heath describes some of the chaos that went into a LITTLE ANNIE FANNY strip on any given segment:

"I met him [Kurtzman] when he was doing the Hey Look strip for Stan Lee up in the Empire State Building and we became friends and went out for lunch. And then he started feeding me little things at lunches and I eventually did a couple things in Mad. I did Help! and Humbug and, of course, Little Annie Fanny for years and years and years. In fact, Hefner moved me out to Chicago because I’d been asking Harvey for a raise for a year, and he says, 'You’re working for Playboy magazine!'

"I say, 'I can’t feed that to my kids.'

"He didn’t pay any attention. I got fed up with him one time. He came down one morning to pick some stuff up at 7:30 from my apartment from where he lives, and he didn’t tell me he was bringing all his daughters with him. So I open the door, haven’t been to bed yet. I’m in my briefs and a T-shirt and they all come running and screaming. A little politeness would have warned me to open the door with some clothes on, right? [Laughter.] And then, this one kid took my spy glasses apart and flushed the lenses down the toilet. That didn’t please me too much.

"But anyway, we cut the pages apart so Willy could work on half of one page while I’m working on the other half and that means cutting all the tissues that were taped on. And, you know, tissues and tape and sticky — it becomes a complete mess. And so I’m sitting there after he left and I thought, 'That’s it, I’ve had it!' I waited for him to get home and I called him and I said, 'Why don’t you come back down here and pick all this stuff up? I’m done, I’m through.' So he panicked and by 5 o’clock Hefner’s on the phone and says, 'I’ll double your salary. I’ll give you my old office to work out of and I’ll physically move you to Chicago.' Well, that was an offer I couldn’t refuse so that’s how I moved to Chicago."

In this particular episode we see Annie meeting up with Arnie Shpritzwasser as Cohan the Barbarian, from "the Hibernian Age, when the sword is mightier than the pen, and the penis is mightier than the swordis"  -- with apologies to Frazetta, of course! "