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.
2 comments:
That splash page - I recognize...
Li'l Abner and Mammy Yokum, Groucho Marx, Mandrake the Magician,
Joe McCarthy, Jackie Gleason, Prince Valiant, some horror host,
Winston Churchill(?), Joe Louis, the Three Little Pigs, and The
Three Stooges (trivia note: Lunatickle #1 dated early 1956,
Shemp Howard died late 1955).
So I'm wondering if you have gone to the trouble of identifying
such caricatures as they appear in the book?
D.D.Degg
(patiently waiting for my pre-ordered copy
to arrive in my local comic book shop)
No, although I had made such lists (just as I had done for the Alter Ego article I wrote about the Mad Comic Book Imitations) we decided the best way to go was to do the back story in the introduction. That is very complete (and checked by a lot of people, as you may know) and I am told it's a good read as well. The reprint section has data on the origin of all the scans, but no explaination. It factored in the choices we made. We think most people will recognize all of the major subjects. Anything beyond that they recognize is a little chance for them to feel special. From the first reactions, it seems to have worked.
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