When starting this bloggy, with its 19th anniversary coming up on 9/5, I added a gallery section that is no longer working. The first thing I put in there were scans of a fumetti (photo comic) from the May, 1965 issue of Harvey Kurtzman’s HELP! magazine.
Not to be confused with the 1965 Beatles movie HELP! that had not yet been named when the January, 1965 issue of HELP! was published.
“Christopher’s Punctured Romance” starred John Cleese as a man with an unhealthy interest in his daughter’s Barbie doll. It starts on page 17.
Terry Gilliam started at HELP! when Gloria Steinem — yes, her — was leaving. Gilliam was the art director at HELP! when he met John Cleese in New York, and “Christopher’s Punctured Romance” was the result.
When Gilliam followed Cleese to England, he recruited Robert Crumb to be his replacement. Crumb arrived just as HELP! publisher James Warren was shutting it down.
I first heard about this amazing sequence of events from Harvey Kurtzman at a Boston NewCon, in 1975 or ’76. Maybe Denro remembers better than I do.