Ok, let's give the marvel monsters a break for now, and let's get Mad!This is another of those unbelievably-awesome, super-thick super specials that came with a full-color replica of an original Mad comic book; in this case its issue #7.
I think I got into this a little bit before, but it's hard to appreciate how revolutionary something was when, to you, its always been around. By the time I was a kid, Mad was an institution; something all kids read at one time or another.
But looking at these early issues, I get a better sense at just how much of a cultural grenade the original Mad was--it was so fast, so irrevrent, so chaotic that reading these early issues as they came out must have been something to behold. Reading a comic book that made fun of everything in 1950's America must have felt so...revolutionary.
In Mad #7, we have "Robinson Crusoe!" by Will Elder, "Prince Violent!" by Wally Wood, who manages to cram approximately sevety-five people in each panel; "Restaurant!" also by Elder; an insane adaptation of the poem "The Face Upon The Floor!" by H.Antoine D'Arcy drawn by Jack Davis; and one last Elder piece "Shermlock Shomes in The Hound of the Basketballs" which to me is more entertaining than any of the original Conan-Doyle stories.
In the Super Special itself, they start it off with about fifteen pages of new material by Mad staples like Sergio Aragones, Tom Rickard, and Bob Clarke. The movie parody is "The Towering Sterno" by Dick DeBartolo and (of course) the master Mort Drucker. After that is classic material by Dave Berg, Don Martin, Prohias' Spy vs. Spy, Arnie Kogen, George Woodbridge, Frank Jacobs, Al Jaffee, and Paul Coker, who draws a still timely piece called "Mad's CIA Agent of the Year".
And of course we get a Mad Fold-In, and a weirdly serious anti-drug poster on the back ("Who goes up...must come down!"). Kind of a discordant note after the seventy-plus pages of silliness that preceeded it, but hey, points for trying something different.
Thanks, usual gang of idiots!
No comments:
Post a Comment