The latest news on my book Behaving Madly (available on Amazon with the button on the right) is that IDW tells us it's will arrive in June. Later than we thought, but I am just glad it turned out so well. And with the closing date on the Eisner Awards at December 31, the closer we are to that the better, right? Anyway, this is not in the book, since it only covers the Mad magazine imitations of the late fifties and not the precursors... I have shown some of Lou Cameron's extraordinary Mad-like satire panel So It Seems from the early fifties. Although some may believe it was inspired by the succes of the early Mad, the style and format itself seem more similar to articles in the post 1954 Mad by Al Feldstein. It seems that Cameron came up with this all by himself. Cameron is in the book, because he only enetered the satire field quite late, when he was asked by Frenzy and Thimk publisher and editor Adrian Lopez to do some work for Frenzy. One of the more remarkable thinks he did was a parody of the tv series Zorro, that looks like a spoof of the Alex Toth comic book version as well. I am guessing sleaze publisher Lopez met Cameron when he was making the shift to pulp/sleaze writer. And he may even have suggested he'd work for Lopez' Mad imitations himself. Funny, how some of the most active satirists came from the sleaze bussiness.
Anyway, you won't even see Cameron here, because these strips are from the later run of So It Seems, when it was taken over by Sy Grudko. As per usual some papers left the original credit line. Grudko changed the original concept a little bit towards the end, by the way.
1 comment:
The art reminds very much the late Dave Berg (from MAD magazine).
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