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.

Say It Ain't Joe

Saturday Leftover Day.

This week I announced my new book from Yoe Books and IDW, available now from comicshops (through the new Previews catalogue) and on Amazon. It's about Mad magazine imitations and apart from a complete historoy of these magazines, you will also get a 160 reprint section. Putting togethr that section was hard work. Here is one of the pieces by Joe Kubert (probably with some unsigned help by Bob Bean) I had to drop in favour of another, shorter one. There are only so many pages in the book and frankly, the four page parody of Walt Disney's nature shows is just as well drawn and a lot more fun to read.

I have many more gems that did not make the cut and I will be showing them here (and on a speial Facebook pagedevoted to the book and the subject) as soon as the book sells out.

By the way, I don't really know how to read these thingsm but the ranking of this book seems to be pretty good or it's genre on Amazon. I don't know how this translates to hard sales, but you can join the ranks by using the link on the right.

Mendelsohn's March of Comics

Monday Cartoon Day.

It took some time to get the scans done, but here are the samples of Jack Mendelsohn's work as a satirical writer I promised last week. Although Mendelsohn became an important writer for Mad later on in the sicties, he dabbled in the genre pretty early on. The first sample is one from a 1950 issue of Dell's 1000 Jokes. The editor of this issue was Mort walker, by the way. I have already shown some of Walker's written pieces for that issue. Or at least the signed ones, as it is possible he did more than just the two I found. I have been looking for the other Walker edited issues from that period, but they haven't turned up yet. If anyone has any to share, please let me know.

As you can see, Mendelsohn's piece was nothing more than an artist's attempt to sell more than one cartoons. Magazines such as 1000 jokes often grouped cartoons together around a theme, so it doesn't come as a surprise that some enterprising cartoonists started assembling their own themed pages. However this page came to be, it is an early example of the 'statement and samples' style of humor that was popularized at Mad under Al Feldsein. As normal as we may think of that 'top ten list' type of humor these days, I have found no samples of it in the humor magazines in the thirties (although there might have been one occasionally) and even Harvey Kurtzman (who did this type of humor for some of his pieces in Variety before Mad, didn't use it in his version of the magazine Mad. It's probably one of those things, which everyone picks up as soon as they see it works (like the addition of speech balloons to photo's with funny captions by Harvey Kurtzman and Stan Lee, who came upon it independendly around the same time).

1000 Jokes, Spring 1950:


The next two pieces are among the prize elements of my book on Mad magazine imitations, if it ever comes to be. I have written about the Mad cmic imitations of 1954 for alter Ego, but an even bigger and more impressive piece could be done about the Mad magazine imitation sof 1957 to 1959. The number of great pages by surprising artists and brand names is staggering. If my current negotiations to turn the first article into a book are a succes, the magazine part will be likely to follow.

One of the major outfits to try and imitate the succes of Kurtman's magazine version of his comic book hit Mad, was pocket book, magazine and comics producer Fawcett. Here was an outfit with seriously deep pockets. They knew that it was wirth the trouble to put out a bit of cash for a magazine that could potentially sell a million copies. And so they hired the best talent, among them Russ Heath, Joe Kubert, Mike Sekowsky, Ross Andru, Basil Wolverton, Jack Mendelsohn and Lee Elias. Their effort was called Lunatickle and it didn't run for more than two issues. But similar material turned up at a cheaper made photo humor book called Cockeyed. This may have been material prepared for a third issue of Lunatickle, but I can't be sure. Both articles here were written by Mendelsohn, whowrote a lot of these books, but he certainly wasn't the only writer. Or even the only name writer. The second one should please any horror comic fan, as it is a ten page examnation of the comic book trials that were held in New York by senator Kefauver. It is everything you wld have hoped Kurtzman's parody of senator McCarthy's communist witchhunt trails What's My Line in Mad would have bee if it had tackled this subject.

Cockeyed #5:






Lunatickle #2: