Joey Anuff is selling a bunch of beautiful original art from Harvey Kurtzman's Humbug humor magazine. (Kurtzman was the creator of Mad and he launched Humbug after leaving Mad.
The high bid on this Jack Davis splash page is just $(removed) The auction ends Friday.
Jack Davis Humbug #7 Sputniks Splash Page 18 Original Art (Humbug, 1957). When Humbug hit the reader racks in August 1957, Harvey Kurtzman delivered his declaration of editorial principles in the first issue, "We won't write for morons. We won't do anything just to get laughs. We won't be dirty. We won't be grotesque. We won't be in bad taste. We won't sell magazines."
Jack Davis has violated nearly all of these principles with his stunning splash page for "Sputniks." For you "fact-niks," in his book The American Language, H. L. Mencken credits the postwar mania for adding "-nik" to the ends of adjectives to create nouns as beginning, not with beatnik or Sputnik, but earlier in the strips of Al Capp's Li'l Abner. Humbug!
This laugh riot has an image area of 10" x 15". There are pasted-on type and art elements, and a few small glue stains; otherwise, the art is in Excellent condition.
Fantagraphics recently published a superb 2-volume Humbug anthology.
Humbug original art on auction block
