Help!

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 Terry Gilliam and 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, and Jay Lynch. Meanwhile, a number of science fiction writers, such as Algis Budrys, were regular contributors of prose and scripts to the magazine. Somewhat more adult and risque 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. Harvey Kurtzman (October 3, 1924 - February 21, 1993), U.S. cartoonist and magazine editor. ... MAD is an American humor magazine founded by publisher William Gaines and editor Harvey Kurtzman in 1952. ... EC may stand for: Early childhood education Eastern Caribbean dollar Sometimes referred to as the (EC$). EC numbers (Enzyme Commission numbers) are used for the numerical classification of enzymes Ecuador (ISO 3166-1 alpha-2 country code) Electron capture - a decay mode for chemical elements Embedded C++ Entertaining Comics entorhinal... Terry Gilliam Terence Vance Gilliam (born November 22, 1940 in Minneapolis, Minnesota, USA) is a film director. ... Gloria Steinem. ... Fumetti is a form of comics illustrated with photographs rather than drawings. ... John Cleese as Q in Die Another Day. ... Woody Allen (born December 1, 1935), is one of the leading American filmmakers. ... Orson Bean, born Dallas Frederick Burroughs (July 22, 1928- in Burlington, Vermont), is an American film actor. ... Monty Pythons Flying Circus (aka Flying Circus or MPFC, known during the fourth season as Monty Python) was the popular BBC sketch comedy show from Monty Python. ... The term underground comics or comix describes the self-published or small press comic books that sprang up in the US in the late 1960s. ... Robert Crumb (born August 30, 1943 in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania) is an artist and illustrator who signs his work R. Crumb. Crumb was one of the founders of the underground comics movement, and is often regarded as the most prominent figure in that movement. ... Gilbert Shelton (born May 31, 1940, Houston, Texas) is an American cartoonist and underground comics artist. ... Algis Budrys (born January 9, 1931) is an American science fiction author. ... The National Lampoon began in 1970 as an offshoot of the Harvard Lampoon humor magazine. ...