Help! (magazine)

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Help! (1960-1965) was a magazine published by James Warren. It was Harvey Kurtzman's longest-running magazine project after leaving Mad and EC Publications, and during its 5 years of operation it was always chronically underfunded, yet innovative. James Warren 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. Some fumetti scripts were by Bernard Shir-Cliff.

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.

Cleese appeared in a Gilliam fumetto called "Christopher's Punctured Romance" about a man who is shocked when he sees that his daughter's new "Barbee" doll has "titties". He falls in love with and has an affair with the doll.