Shifting Sideways

Wednesday Advertising Day.

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.

Not What It Seems

Tuesday Comic Strip Day.

I have shown some samples of this strip before, but if I had more, I would gladly show them all. In 1952 later comic book artist and pulp writer Lou Cameron did a shortlived series that can be seen as a precursor to the later Mad magazine. His So It Seems featured a Mad-like series of illustrations of a comic premiss every day. I don;t think he influenced anyone with this - not Harvey Kurtzman, who never actually went for this type of humor, nor Al feldstein, who did not need inspiration. In my book Behaving Madly (about the Mad magazine imitations of the late fifties) I did not have room to show this (or any of the other precursors) but I do mention it, when Mr. Cameron shows up in some of the later pardoies I did include in the book. Apparently he was very much suited to this type of work, only no one ever knew, so he only did it sporadictly. Sy Grudk, who took over from him, didn't always follow the concept to the letter, but he did keep it going into 1953, although it may actually have run shorter than I know, because some of these strips have different dates on them.

More Than It Seems

Monday Cartoon Day.

Next August Alter Ego #86 will have my long-awaited (by my mom, at least) article about all Mad comic book imitations from the mid-fifties. I had written this article to catalogue my own collection and when Roy thomas got wind of it, he wanted it for his excellent magazine. I rewrote it and made sure it was complte and definite and we decided on a lovely cover homage to Harvey Kurtzman... and the Roy found out I was much too long for one magazine, so he decided to do one 50 pages in #86 and the rest (probably more more pages) in one of the first issues next year. So I need you all t go out and buy Alter Ego #86, so Roy won't be temped to postpone the second part. It is profusely illustrated, as you may have come to expect from me (and Roy, who dded his own comments and a couple of nice comparisons of strips Mad parodied). What I didn't include, were these.

At the start of the article I write a bit about Mad's precursors and stuff that might or might not have influenced Kurtzman in the creation of Mad. One of the things that gets talked about, s the atmosphere of satire that was in the air in the early fifties. College magazines were selling well and Sid Ceasar was doing movie parodies on his Your Show of Shows. Around the same time Kurtzman started Mad, comic artist Lou Cameron did a short-lived satirical newspaper strip called So It Seems. The titles seems to be a parody of the many 'interesting facts' panels that were around, such as Ripley's Believe It Or Not and John Hix Strange As It Seems, but it was more of a 'statement and sample' series, along the lines of those that were later done for the magazine Mad.

Lou Cameron was a journeyman artist who did a lot of work for Classics Illustrated. He also did a lot of horror stories for companies such as Ace and even Atlas Tales (though those were all post-code). This strip ran for about six months in 1952, but I am not sure of the date because the one paper I found that ran it always ran it one to three weeks later dan the date in the strip itself.