Dir: Bart Simpson | UK/Canadian co-production, 2026 — 92’
There is a delicious irony in the title of Bart Simpson’s The Mad World of Harvey Kurtzman: the film is concerned with a man whose work made a career out of puncturing pomposity, yet whose own career was repeatedly frustrated by the very machinery of commercial culture that he helped to satirise. Kurtzman, creator of MAD and one of the crucial architects of modern American cartooning, emerges here not simply as a comic-book pioneer but as a restless, difficult and surprisingly vulnerable artist.
Simpson’s documentary is less interested in turning Kurtzman into a monument than in recovering the contradictions within the man. Born in Brooklyn in 1927 to immigrant parents, Kurtzman discovered early that drawing could be both vocation and weapon. His work for EC Comics, the creation of MAD in 1952 and his subsequent experiments with Trump, Help! and underground cartooning chart an extraordinary creative trajectory — but also one marked by disputes, commercial disappointments and an abiding sense that recognition had somehow failed to match achievement.
That tension gives the film its dramatic shape. Kurtzman was hugely influential yet rarely enjoyed the level of mainstream fame attached to figures he inspired. Simpson makes the paradox central: this is a portrait of an artist who changed popular culture while remaining, in some respects, a cult figure within it.
The film’s greatest asset is its archive. Kurtzman is allowed to speak for himself through remarkably revealing footage and recordings, while drawings, magazine pages and photographs are deployed not merely as illustration but as evidence of a constantly evolving visual imagination. The presence of contributors such as Robert Crumb, Terry Gilliam, Matt Groening and Sergio Aragonés establishes the extraordinary reach of Kurtzman’s influence. The late Stan Lee also appears in archive material, providing a particularly resonant connection between two very different traditions of American comics.
Simpson wisely avoids constructing a conventional celebratory documentary. There is admiration here, certainly, but also friction. Kurtzman’s perfectionism, stubbornness and sometimes abrasive personality are not airbrushed away. Family recollections complicate the public mythology, bringing into focus the private man behind the cultural legend. His later struggle with Parkinson’s gives the film an unexpectedly melancholy dimension, and the documentary becomes increasingly concerned with mortality, memory and the preservation of an artist’s legacy.
Visually, The Mad World of Harvey Kurtzman understands that a film about Kurtzman cannot simply sit back and interview people in front of neutral backgrounds. Animation, graphic material and archival imagery give the film an appropriately restless surface. The visual language reflects the collision of comics, advertising, underground culture and mass entertainment that Kurtzman himself helped engineer. An original jazz score adds another layer, giving the documentary an energetic, improvisatory quality rather than the solemnity that often weighs down biographical documentaries.
Yet Simpson’s approach is not without limitations. The film occasionally risks becoming almost too respectful of the historical importance it is attempting to establish. The succession of admirers can sometimes make Kurtzman’s influence appear inevitable in retrospect, whereas the more interesting story lies precisely in his failures, compromises and marginal position. The documentary is strongest when it allows those contradictions to remain unresolved.
What emerges is a portrait of an artist who understood that humour could be more subversive than seriousness. Kurtzman’s satire attacked advertising, politics, militarism, celebrity and the increasingly homogenised culture of postwar America; but the film also makes clear that MAD was not simply a successful magazine. It was a new way of looking — a visual grammar of irreverence that subsequently seeped into underground comics, television, animation and contemporary satire.
For a younger audience, the film provides a useful corrective to the assumption that satire began with contemporary television or the internet. Kurtzman’s world was already questioning the relationship between commerce and creativity, celebrity and authenticity, and entertainment and political dissent decades before those arguments became commonplace.
The title promises madness; what Simpson finally finds is something more complicated — an artist whose genius was inseparable from his dissatisfaction. The Mad World of Harvey Kurtzman is at its best when it recognises that the man behind MAD was not simply the joker throwing stones at American culture, but one of the people who helped invent its modern language of dissent.
A lively, affectionate and sometimes searching piece of cultural history, Simpson’s film makes a persuasive case that Harvey Kurtzman’s legacy extends far beyond the magazine that made his name. He did not merely make MAD funny. He helped make irreverence a serious cultural force.
The film had its World Premiere at EIFF on Sunday 16 August 2026