Pat Mallet is a French cartoonist, who is best known for his full page cartoons about 'little green men'. In the late sixties he was part of the same crowd that did funny stuff for Pilote Magazine Pilote was run by Asterix author René Goscinny, who had met Mad creator Harvey Kurtzman twenty years before and was responsible for bringing more and more Mad style humor to Pilote. Together with Gotlib, he did Les Dingodossiers, a series of satirical features that were sort of like 'statement and samples' articles of Al Feldstein's Mad of the sixties (although Kurtzman had done a couple of those for Varsity Magazine in the late forties - when we met and worked with Goscinny). Later, he would allow some of his contributors to do more topical stuff. But before the Paris 'revolution' of 1968 he was more interested in the more generally irreverant and silly. Mallet fitted right into that and did a large amount of tories, some of which featured his martian character. Like this sixpager, which also has the bonus of being one of those selfreferential comic stories I like.
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Terry Gilliam also did stuff for Pilote, and as you know, was Kurtzman's assistant in Help. Harry North, who would later work for MAD, started with Pilote. In fact, Pilote is the closest there is to what MAD was back then, especiallly since, as you said, Goscinny had met Kurtzman before. BTW, Kurtzman also helped Goscinny and Uderzo translating Oumpah-Pah, the series they'd done about an American Indian, and that they had created just before Asterix.
Pilote had many great cartoonists (Fieffer also did stuff for them), and Kurtzman would also draw some stories for Gotlib when he ran Fluide Glacial.
I have recently bought most of 1967 and I am scanning all 'additional material' from those years. In 1968 the artists 'freed' themselves of editorial interference and Goscinny had to step back. Gotlib went on on his own and many artists poo-pooed the earlier work. Most of it was never reprinted. Seeing it after all those year it is amazing to see how in tune Goscinny was with this new generation and how he shepared them up to the point they took over. Ironicly, Kurtzman went through the same process, from being the harbringer of the new movement to being an old fogey in a couple of years. Only he lived long enough to see the feelings of the day die down and recieve his deserved praise at a later age. Goscinny died in the early eighties from heartfailure when his doctor asked him to do a treadmill test for his heart...
Speaking about Goscinny, he also spoke spanish fluently, as he had lived in Argentina as a kid, before moving to New York in the late 40's with his mother. His speaking spanish might've been the reason a lot of Spanish artists worked for Pilote and him as well.
Goscinny's work with Gotlib is perhaps the closest there is to a MAD article.
As a matter of fact, Pilote, by its close resemblance to MAD and Kurtzman deserves a closer look here, Ger, as most Americans don't know much about it. They also had some of the finest talent around, and had perhaps, the best collection of artists that had ever been gathered in any magazine.
I will certainly share some of the Dingodossier pages, although as per usual for me I will concentrate on the pages not collecte in any of the three books. But you are right, the Dingodossiers were the most Mad-like in their 'statement and sample' form. A form, by the way that Kurtzman never used in Mad (it was Feldstein who exploited that), only in his earlier material for Varsity, which he made when Goscinny was around. Hm...
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