Another one of the superb Super Specials that Mad put together in the late seventies featuring complete, regular-sized reprints of the classic early, comic book Mad.This special features a reprint of Mad #1, arguably one of the most influential and important comics ever printed. I can't imagine what a mental grenade this first issue must have been to kids buying it at the time, since they had no chance to prepare themselves for the material inside.
One of the things I never realized about these reprints was that they're not issue specific--Mad was moving various stories around in these reprints, so that the material reprinted here--Wally Wood's "Superduperman", John Severin's "Melvin of the Apes!", Will Elder's "Outer Sanctum!"--didn't actually appear in Mad #1. Weird.
Anyway, as if that wasn't enough, Mad gave you another eighty pages of classic material for your 60 cents(cheap!):
"Don Martin Tries 8 New Ways to Fly", "Mad's Chemical Banquet", "Legendary Medicine Cabinets", "When the 'No Opinion' People Become the Majority", Frank Jacobs' and Mort Drucker's spot-on parody called "Can A Lot"--completely done in song; Dave Berg's "The Lighter Side of American Tourists", and "The Mad Ice Hockey Primer", drawn by the legendary Jack Davis!
One of my favorite pieces is "If Comic Strips Covered the Burning Issues of the Day", featuring Superman dealing with air pollution, Dick Tracy engaging in police brutality(something Gould himself probably wanted to do), and Beetle Bailey's stance on Vietnam. A very silly piece, but undeniably funny:
...I dunno, that makes me laugh everytime I see it.There's also Don Martin taking on duck hunters, "The Mad Poetry Round Robin" by Jacobs and George Woodbridge, "A Mad Peek Behind the Scenes at an Airport" by Larry Siegel and Jack Rickard, the uber-cynical "Christmas Is...", Spy Vs. Spy by Prohias, "Horrifying Cliches" drawn by Paul Coker(one of my favorites), "A Mad Look At Realistic Dolls", "The Lighter Side of the Generation Gap", "Don Martin in a Fancy Restaurant", "If Polls and Surveys Had Been Used Through History", "A Mad Look At Frustration", "The Odd Squad" by Dick De Bartolo and Drucker, plus more Spy Vs. Spy and Don Martin--*whew*!
Plus it all wraps up with another Mad Fold-In, and on the back cover with one more swipe at the Tobacco Industry, one of Mad's favorite targets.
If you're a Mad fan, you can't beat the value you get with these specials, even at the prices they command on ebay. You get a ton of great material by the all-stars of the Mad team, plus the classic comic book Mad! You'd be an idiot--and not the good, usual-gang-of kind--to pass 'em up.
5 comments:
I remember picking this one up. It was the first time I say a "real" 4-color mad comic, even though I'd been buying up the paperbacks that reprinted them.
This isn't a reprint of MAD #1, though. The cover is from #1, but the stories were cherry-picked from other issues.
I used to buy all the Mad Specials like this, I always had to beg to get them at the grocery checkout. A lot of the "topical" references to Viet Nam and Richard Nixon flew over my head though.
MDG & Rob-
That was my same experience, with the Comic MAD (though now I've got the great, mag. sized repros from a few years back.)
The b & w MAD really was quite something, to boys just feeling their oats back then; I pick up a current (now, back in color!) ish, but it doesn't seem to have as much Edge?
-Craig W.
Four or five years ago, one of my sons was subscribing to MAD, but I didn't enjoy it. It always seemed to me that at it's post-Kurtzman peak--59 until 74 (and they didn't have Nixon to kick around anymore) it was an irreverent look at "the adult world." It let kids laugh at their parent's generation.
The post-Feldstein/Gaines version seemed more tied into the present generation, so the jokes were all about Howard Stern, American Idol, rap-star feuds... and all pretty toothless, because it was hardly taking on any sacred cows.
Biggest disappointment: Monroe by Bill Wray. He's a great artist and that series was crap.
Jack Davis stopped drawing for MAD because he didn't like the idea of his grandkids reading it.
MDG-
I think you pretty much nailed it!
But MAN - in those peak years, waren't it Sa-WEET?
-Craig W.
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