Goodman Beaver

Goodman Beaver is a fictional character who appears in comics created by American cartoonist Harvey Kurtzman. Goodman is a naive and optimistic Candide-like character, oblivious to the corruption and degeneration around him, and whose stories were vehicles for social satire and pop culture parody. Except for the character's first appearance, which Kurtzman did alone, the stories were written by Kurtzman and drawn by Will Elder.

Goodman first appeared in a story in Harvey Kurtzman's Jungle Book in 1959; the best-remembered were the five strips the Kurtzman–Elder team produced in 1961–62 for the Kurtzman-edited magazine Help! They tend to be in the parodic style Kurtzman developed when he wrote and edited Mad in the 1950s, but with more pointed, adult-oriented satire and much more refined and detailed artwork on Elder's part, filled with numerous visual gags.

The best-known of the Goodman Beaver stories is "Goodman Goes Playboy" (1962), a satire on the hedonistic lifestyle of Hugh Hefner using parodies of Archie comics characters, whose publisher threatened a lawsuit. The issue was settled out of court, and the copyright for the story passed to Archie Comics. Hefner, the actual target of the strip, found it amusing. Kurtzman and Elder developed a female version of Goodman Beaver for Playboy magazine called Little Annie Fanny (1962–88).

Goodman Beaver is a naïve and optimistic character, oblivious to the degeneration around him. According to Kurtzman, the character was partially inspired by Voltaire's Candide and Harold Gray's comic strip character Little Orphan Annie, who, like Goodman, was drawn with blank circles for eyes. Art critic Greil Marcus compares Goodman to Young Goodman Brown in Nathaniel Hawthorne's tale of the same name—both are pure-souled characters who become disillusioned by the depravity they confront in the world.

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