My book Behaving Madly is now safely at the printer's. It has over 160 pages of reprint material from the best of the mad imitators. Which means I was not able to include some terrific pieces. Here is the splash page for a ten page space parody by Le Elias for Lunatickle, which lost out to his ten page horror comics parody (also from Lunatickle). In the end the second one (written by Jack Mendelsohn) was more entertaining and more interesting as a satire. Both illustrate how much Lunatickle followed the model of the early Harvey Kurtzman Mad magazine.
By the way, the second story was very hard to clean up properly. It took me ten tries over a three month period, probably about a day a page. The first one looks all right, but is how I got stuck halfway through. At first I was able to produce pretty good clean-ups using a color mode which look fine on the internet, although the color is of course false and a byproduct of the cleaning process. But in the end, they would have been printed badly because the black inthere isn't black enough. Getting a good black and white version without loosing the details or (in some cases) the shading) was hard. Of course, we colored the paper a little bit, to keep a nostalgic old paper feel to the reprint instead of a harsh sharp black and white.
I intend to show of of the stories I did not use in the book in a seperate blog, but I don't want to hurry that because I do not wat to give people the impression they are going to be in the book and I also don't want to give away everything that is in the book. So we are waiting for the first sales figures to come in before starting the blog - or maybe I will give over this blog to that for a couple of months.
I hope you will give the book a chance. Have a look at the trailer Craig provided.
7 comments:
I like the cartoon showing the "Echh Publications" chart - It reminds me of Marvel'sl "Not Brand Echh" comics - I collected what I think is all 13 issues in the series.
Wasn't it eleven issues? I have them too. Actually, Marvel's later version What The--?! was also very good and collectable. But indeed, someone should do a search for the origin of Ecch. Jack Mendelsohn's use here makes me think it was something common in humor (maybe in radio shows).
I checked and I have all 13 - #1 had a publishing date of August, 1967 (people named as responsible included Irving Forbush, Stan Lee, Solly Brodsky, Roy Thomas and Gary Friedrich with cover by Jack Kirby) and #13 (unfortunately not in good condition) May, 1969, (people named as responsible included Stan Lee, Roy Thomas, Marie Severin, Jean Izzo ("LETTERIN') and Irv Forbush). I also have #1 of Marvel's "SPOOF" dated October, 1970, with responsible people, Stan Lee, Roy Thomas (writer), Marie Severin (art), Sam Rosen (lettering), Stu Schwartzberg (writer/artist), Jean Izzo (letterer), Len Win (writer) and #1 of Marvel's "CRAZY" dated February, 1972, with Stan Lee, Gary Friedrich, Tom Sutton, Artie Simek, Roy Thomas, John Verpoorten, "J." Rosen, Gene Colan, J. Tartaglione, L.P. Gregory and Marie Severin.
I recall Marvel had two "Crazy"s- the first was color and regular sized, devoted more to spoofing their superheroes (The Mighty Sore, Iron Can, etc.) The second "Crazy" was B&W, magazine sized, and more of a Mad ripoff - its first mascot was "The Nebbish," and the second mascot was "Obnoxio the Clown," better known for taking on the X-Men in a one-shot.
The first Crazy was a reprint of 1954's Get Lost by Russ Andru and Mike Esposito with new covers, which you can read all about in The Sincerest Form of Parody from Fantagraphics or my two articles in Alter Ego covering all Mad comic book imitations two years before that. The magazine Crazy was set up by Stan Lee to be more like the Mad magazine and edited by Marv Wolfman - one of the best Mad magazine imitations ever to be produced. Much less juvenile than Cracked or Sick at that time. They even had covers by Kelly Freas, Mad's original cover artist (before Norman Mingo). There also was Spoof, a comic book sized parody magazine with Mary Severin doing tv shows and movie and anything but superheroes.
I was never a Marvel fan but one of the things about Not Brand Echh that I thought was unique was their indulgence in SELF-parody, sending up their own superheroes and characters, not taking themselves too seriously. Not sure their main rival, D.C. did the same.
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