Yours, Madly

Friday Comic Book Day.

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.