The Other Trump

Not Donald Trump, but TRUMP, the glossy 1957 humor magazine edited by Harvey Kurtzman for two issues before publisher Hugh Hefner pulled the plug on it, ostensibly for financial reasons ("I gave Harvey an unlimited budget... and he exceeded it") but also because Hef apparently had doubts about the magazine's prospects for success at the then-exorbitant price of fifty cents an issue. I just finished reading the recently published volume, THE COMPLETE TRUMP, edited and with invaluable annotations by Dennis Kitchen. I urge all fans of Kurtzman, Will Elder, Wallace Wood, Jack Davis, Arnold Roth and Al Jaffee to get hold of this beautiful book. I confess that while the two issues are beautifully done, with color paintings and an elegant and sophisticated layout, they're just not as funny as Kurtzman's work on the early issues of MAD. It seems that he repressed some of his anarchic humor in a possibly misguided desire to be classy and upscale. Nonetheless, there are some real gems in this volume including a hilarious spoof of DEATH OF A SALESMAN by a young Mel Brooks. 

Kitchen has included drawings and layouts intended for the unpublished issue number #3 which suggests the future direction Kurtzman was planning to take the magazine in. One can see TRUMP as a kind of bridge between MAD and NATIONAL LAMPOON --not as groundbreaking as the first and not as raunchy and political as the second, but a valiant project that sadly never had the chance to really prove itself. This long overdue collection is a steal at $20.