The Games We Play

Friday Comic Book Day.

What a year this was. Most of it was devoted to comics and I enjoyed it a lot. It is always nice to have succes, anyway. My book Behaving Madly was published in August at the Comic Con in San Diego and received pretty well. I am pleased to note that after Christmas a spade of new positive reviews appeared n facebook and other places, which lead to a new spike in sales on Amazon. In fact, they are now announcing that there are only 17 copies left. I have known for some time copies were running low, because we couldn't get ny to send to friends and reviewers for a couple of months now. They only copies remaining are at different stores and whatever is left undsold there will be what is left of the first print run.

One thing I hope for the new year is that the succes of this book will make it possible to do a similar one on the early issues of Cracked. I am not really very interested in Cracked after the first forty issues or so. It had started as a very well made satirical magazine, but devolved into a juvenile Mad imitation somewhere bewteen #15 and #45. The reason that this took so long, is th fact that some artists, most noticable Jack Davis, were allowed to do their own gags. But slowly Paul Laikin took over and started writing his trademark Mad knock-offs. Anyway, because the copyright situation for Cracked is unsure and because we already had to cut 40 pages from the originally planned 248 pages (to keep the price at $34/$26 at Amazon) and these early issues of Cracked alone could easilly fill a book on it's own.

As a sample, here is the onely Jack Kirby story in Cracked #14. Not typically his. Sp much so, that when an original page came for sale on eBay, I skipped it, not able to place the artist. My guess is there is a Cracked collector somewhere who got this page for $50 without knowing what he has.

The Cuban Connection

Friday Comic Book Day.

I am still selling my comics on eBay. In the course of preparing those pages, I come across stuff I forgot I had. One of those is a find I did years ago, a story in Prize's Justice Traps the Guilty I believe to be by Ric Estrada. Estrada is a respected artis who today is mostly remembered for his work vaguely Tothlike at the DC war titles in the sixties. BUt he was around before that, even doing a story for Harvey Kurtzman at EC about Cuban fighters. In the late fifties he went to Germany for two years, as I recently found out because he was a Mormon and was doing his regular duty to go from door to door there. Before that very little of his career was known, until I found that he had drawn more than half of the two first issues of Mad magazine imitator Frantic. You will find some of those pages in my book Behaving Madly (linked on the right) and I will add one I didn't use to this post. Even then I knew about the Justice Traps the Guilty story, but I couldn't find it in any of my books anymore. So there I was scanning for a set of British JTTG reprints, when it turned up in black and white. I immediately made photos and for this blog I went to the Digital Comics Museum and got the proper scanned version in color as well, from Justice Traps the Guilty #77. It shows the slightly flowery style Estrada used in some of his other comic book work a couple of years before that (which you will find if you follow the Estrada link below).

As a sidenote, Mort Meskin lovers will see that some of the panels are fully redone, probably because of some comic code requesed rewrite. Maybe Estrada had already left for Germany and wasn't available. The Frantic pieces are unsigned, while most of Estrada's work for Frantic was, which is the mean reason I did not used this in the book. But it looks lovely, doesn't it?

Mad As Mad Can Be

Friday Comic Book Day.

Three months after it was published my book Behaving Madly keeps selling well and getting good reviews. The last one by Steve Heller, formerly of the Nwe Tork Times and New York Times Bok Review. Here is a page by Don Orehek I ended up not using. It was for the Not Mad section and was on eof two pieces Irehek did directly copying a Mad feature or artist. In this case A Movie Scene We'd Like To See by Interlandi, which was initiated by Harvey urtzman in his magazine version of Mad and later continued in Al Feldstein's 'regular' Mad.

If you haven't got my and Craig Yoe's book about Mad magazine imitations yet, yu can get your copy in Amazon by using the link on the right. it will even make me three cents, I believe. You can also buy it in Craig's store (www.yoebooks.com) or ask your own bookstore. The more people get to see this book, the better.

IMPORTANT ANNOUNCEMENT

Temporary problems week.

On Monday my mother had a fall and broke her hip. She now needs care 24/7 which my brother and I are providing. This means I am hopelessly behind on the blog, but don't despair. More will be coming as soon as I find the time.

For now I am leaving you with an image I prepared for the presentation of my book Behaving Madly at the American Book Center in Amsterdam. I will give a short show and tell about the book and a copy will be handed to famous dutch comic book and illustration artist Dick Matena. Dick was very much influenced by Mad in his early days and particulary Jack Davis. Of course, Davis is one of the main attractions in the book, so that all fits. For the announcement I used one of Dick's later drawings showing a clear Davis influence. It's from 1976 and was the cover of a sexual information magazine.

Slick Sick Pick

Wednesday Illustration Day.

I am a huge fan of the later satirical work of Bob Powell. I was able to include a couple of prime examples in my book Behaving Madly (clck on the right of this to get yours). He did some of his best work for Sick, which deserves a book all of it's own. One of the things he was best at, was doing magazine parodies, the same way Bob Clarke and George Woodbridge did for Mad. Here is a good one he did for Sick in 1965.

Summer Lovin' 14

Wednesday Summer Special.

Today I am heading home. See ya there! I am ending this summer bonanza with another peek at my new book Behaving Madly. It should be in stores one of these days. Please tell me if you have received yours.

Here's another item that was not included in the book, even though I quite like it. One of the reasons was that blowing up up this comic book sized story to the size of our (Craig Yoe and I) book didn't work in it's favor. Also, we do have a Beetle parody by the same artist as part of a larger Mad style spoof of several strips. And we do have a great Elvis movie parody by John Severin, so even that is covered.

To Use Or Not To Use

Wednesday Advertising Day.

As I promised last week, I will use the tradition advertising post on Wednesday to show your some of the stuff Craig Yoe and I didn't include in Behaving Madly, the Mad Magazine Imitation book coming out from IDW one of these days. Craig and I will be signing the first copies at the IDW booth at the San Diego Comic Con on Friday from 1 to 2.

Going through all the magazines involved, it struck me taht some movies and some tv shows were parodied more often than others. In the book we included one parody of the Glen Ford movie Blackboard Jungle, a marvelous piece by Art Gates for Crazy, Man, Crazy. But there were also parodies of this movie in Snafu (by Russ Heath) and Mad itself. Of course we couldn't use the Mad parody (by Walace Wood) and the Russ Heath one was printed very badly in all of the samples we found. And fortunately we were able to include a lot more terrific stuff by Heath anyway.

Another tv phenomenon spoofed a lot was the $64.000. Before the fraud scandal broke, many people were suspicious of the program. And some pretty good artists were involved. Ross Andru did one for Lunatickle in the style of Kurtzman's Mad magazine parodies, Mike Sekowsky a more illustrative one for Cockeyed and even Art Gates got into the game with a short parody for Crazy, Man, Crazy. We ended up using none of them, because Andru's was a bit too long (so we included a funny image from one of his other long parodies), Mike Sekowsky's not funny enough (but we did include a large illustration from it) and Art Gates was already given his due.

This may seem unfortunate, but I think it worked out fine. The book represents the best of the genre and is already being reviewed positively for some of it's more unique surprises. If we would have filled the book with sample after sample it would have hurt the impact from the ones we do have. In the forty page introduction I have taken care to describe every title so you will know what's in what and if you want to go and buy some more, you will know what to choose. That way we have hopefully made a book that caters to the collectors and the unitiated in an equal way.

But enough with the apologies, here are the stories.

Peek-A-Book

Wednesday Advertising Day.

For the next few weeks I will be using the Wednesday to share stuff from my new book Behaving Madly, which will be out any day now. It is of course also available from Amazon and if you use the link to your right I will actually get 1.4 cent from it as well.

Some of the hardest choices to make when deciding what to include and what not to include had to do with the number of longer pieces we could run. The first wave of Mad magazine imitation were based on the format (and success) of the early Mad magazine issues made by Harvey Kurtzman. He had introduced a new format to do movie parodies, turning it into a eight to nine page story which was presented in three rows with illustrations above the text. All of the early imitations followed that format (down to the single page opening image before the story actually started. While many of these longer stories are artistically interesting, textwise they tend to get a bit boring after a couple of pages. So whenever we had the choice to present a certain artist (like Joe Kubert or Bob Powell) with a shorter piece, we chose to do that. Some of the larger images were used in the introduction though. I always knew that I could show some of those longer pages here, for the afficionados. So here is a loneger Joe Kubert story, which I am showing in mid-clean-up since the decision to cut it was made before creating the final version for print. Enjoy it and I hope you will get the book to see more of the background and more material by Joe Kubert (a wonderful parody of Walt Disney's True-Life Adventures nature documentary series) and all of the other artists.