Comic Warehouse - Harvey Kurtzman's "Help! Magazine" Price Guide

Help! Magazine Price Guide

General Promotions Inc/Help Magazine Inc. (#1 Aug 1960 - #26 Sep 1965)

Harvey Kurtzman's longest-running magazine project after leaving Mad Magazine and EC Publications, Help! (1960-1965) was a chronically underfunded but innovative magazine published by James Warren, who was also publishing successful monster-movie and horror comics magazines simultaneously. Kurtzman's assistants over the run of the magazine included a young Terry Gilliam and a young Gloria Steinem; the latter was apparently very helpful in gathering the celebrity comedians who would appear on the covers of each issue, as well as occasionally to serve as actor/models in the fumetti strips the magazine ran along with more traditional comics and text pieces. (Among the then little-known performers in the fumetti were John Cleese and Woody Allen; better-known performers such as Orson Bean were also known to participate.)

Gilliam, aside from meeting Cleese for the first time, years before their work together in Monty Python's Flying Circus, was also instrumental in helping to gather a number of the best younger talents who were to go on to influential careers in underground comix as well as the mainstream: among them Robert Crumb, Gilbert Shelton, Skip Williamson, and Jay Lynch. Meanwhile, a number of science fiction writers, such as Algis Budrys, Ray Bradbury, and Arthur C. Clarke were regular contributors of prose and scripts to the magazine. Somewhat more adult and risqué than Mad, Help! was nonetheless not as sexually-explicit nor taboo-breaking as the comix, the contemporaneous The Realist or the later National Lampoon were or would be, but nonetheless scored telling points, and served as a locus and starting point for a wide range of talent.

The most notorious article to appear in Help! was "Goodman Beaver Goes Playboy!", a ribald parody of Archie Comics that resulted in a lawsuit from Archie's publisher.

GD	VG	FN	VF	VF/NM	NM
6	12	18	40	60	80

#1 Aug 1960 Robert Sheckley, Rod Serling, Will Elder, Arnold Roth, Jack Davis

Sid Caesar photo cover, Elvis photo

#2 -

#3 Oct 1960 Robert Sheckley, Jack Davis, Arnold Roth, Ed Fisher

Jerry Lewis photo cover

#4 -

#5 -

#6 -

#7 Feb 1961 Gahan Wilson, Arnold Roth, JFK & Jackie photos

#8 Mar 1961 Skip Williamson, Algis Budrys, Shel Silverstein

Hugh Downs photo cover, JFK photo

#9 Apr 1961 Ray Bradbury, Gahan Wilson, Gloria Steinem,

JFK, Eisenhower, Nixon photos

#10 -

#11 Jun 1961 Jack Davis

#12 Sep 1961 Ed Fisher, Arnold Roth, Al Jaffee, Will Elder

Goodman Beaver

Volume 2 #1 (#13) Feb 1962 Algis Budrys, Russ Heath, Will Elder

JFK, Nixon, Grace Kelly photos, Goodman Beaver

Volume 2 #2 (#14) May 1962 Gilbert Shelton

JFK photo, Goodman Beaver

Volume 2 #3 (#15) Aug 1962

JFK, Jackie, Eisenhower photos, Goodman Beaver

Volume 2 #4 (#16)

Volume 2 #5 (#17) Feb 1963 Terry Gilliam

JFK, Robert Kennedy photos, Goodman Beaver

Volume 2 #6 (#18) May 1963 Terry Gilliam

JFK, Lyndon Johnson photo, Gilbert Shelton’s Wonder Wart-Hog

Volume 2 #7 (#19) Oct 1963 Terry Gilliam, Jack Davis, Woody Allen, Jay Lynch

Nixon photo

Volume 2 #8 (#20) Feb 1964 Terry Gilliam, Skip Williamson