Mad magazine C/D

Every time I need to feel better in an implacable way I always check out his bio, The Mad World of William M. Gaines, from the library. I find it so inspiring. Him & Roald Dahl were wine buddies!

William Gaines favorite movie was "Inherit the Wind." He said he could relate to it.

Mentioned on the rolling obit thread but RIP John Severin:

http://www.comicsbeat.com/2012/02/14/rip-john-severin/

Aww. Dude was an awesome draftsman and always game for anything. And he'd been doing it forever! I was always surprised in recent years when I saw new stuff of his. These guys who practically die at their drawing boards are such an inspiration to find something you love doing until the day you bow out.

I thought he was immortal. spent 60+ years working in comics.

Some Severin greatness here:

http://www.ha.com/common/search_results.php?Nty=1&Ntk=SI_Titles&Ne=1058&N=790+231+1067&Ntt=john+severin

This is a great interview from '99. Nice to see Comics Journal post it, if only because it means I don't have to dig out those issues.

http://www.tcj.com/the-john-severin-interview-parts-i-ii/

http://mobile.avclub.com/articles/get-involved-internet-help-bring-the-story-of-mad,91785/?mobile=true

An important Kickstarter!

Director Alan Bernstein hopes to change that with When We Went Mad! A Documentary Of Ecch-ic Proportions, a film chronicling the magazine’s development through the decades. But he needs your help! Bernstein is looking to raise $50,000 on Kickstarter to complete his film, and is a little over halfway past his goal, with nine days remaining. Considering the magazine’s impact and legacy, it’s shocking that a film like this doesn’t already exist, but you now have an opportunity to help correct that oversight.

I can still recall the first time I read a Mad Magazine. It was in Reno, NV, on a summer vacation car trip with my parents in 1964. A few moths later I discovered some paperbacks that reprinted the first several years of Mad from the mid-fifties. I still think that Mad's golden age was before my time, as captured in those paperbacks. Every panel was crammed with background visual jokes.

does everything need a fucken documentary now?

everything that's exploitable from boomer era, yes WGW

Grady Hendrix on the movie parodies:

http://filmcomment.com/article/mad-magazine-movie-parodies

shall be going to see this when i'm in NYC:

http://www.societyillustrators.org/The-Museum/2013/Harvey-Kurtzman/The-Art-of-Harvey-Kurtzman.aspx

Nice article

yeah great piece. last paragraph is extra lols

The magazine once received a letter from Lucasfilm’s legal department after their Empire Strikes Back parody, demanding that they recall all printed copies of the issue and destroy them. MAD replied by sending a copy of another letter they had received the previous month—from George Lucas, offering to buy the original artwork for the Empire parody and comparing Mort Drucker to Leonardo Da Vinci and the parody’s writer, Dick De Bartolo, to Mark Twain. They never heard from Lucasfilm’s legal department again.

so, MAD gets lots of love.

for a reason i can no longer recall when young, i used to get CRACKED on a regular basis - which being UK based is really weird.

my mountain of CRACKED mags has long since gone missing .. which i often regret dearly.

should i waste time/money/energy on this regret, or, would i take one look at an old copy and realise the errors of my ways ..

CRACKED had gd distribution in the UK for years, for some reason

CRACKED also managed to secure former MAD/EC artist John Severin and, near the end of his life, Don Martin - but on the whole their contributors were def second (or third) division compared to the likes of Mort Drucker

so mark e i wld say that it's prob best not to spoil a happy childhood memory (also, I suspect that back issues these days are not that cheap - don't see them that often in the UK)

yeah .. i know that stuff is ££ now - hence my concern re tracking some old copies down.
weirdly i did wonder re don martin ..
i thought i had seen his stuff in CRACKED but given previous posts re him and MAD etc, thought this was a false memory ..
used to have some DM books as well.
he was such a massive talent ..

for some reason I thought CRACKED grab Sergio Aragones at one point too

but yeah they were always 2nd-tier

us brits always love the underdog ..

p sure aragones never worked for CRACKED

mark, if you like don martin it's worth hunting round for this MASSIVE complete box set of all his MAD magazine work (doesn't include the original paperback material as that's still owned by the Martin estate) - i picked up my copy in a London remainder shop for well under £30 (and then had to lug it all the way back to glasgow!), and i'm sure there are copies to be had online - it's a stunner

http://www.comicsbeat.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/01/don.jpg

ah yeah a friend has that. it's amazing to thumb through.

I got a remainder from The Strand, and they shipped it to my house for whatever their flat fee is - $4.50 or something. It's amazing.

oh my god.
that looks properly fantastic ..
f*ck ..
i want that.

£125 on amazon ..

dream on ..

unless his recent illness has slowed him down, Aragones has only missed one issue of Mad in forty years - of course he's fast enough to have had a falling out, done a year's worth of work for Cracked in an afternoon and then gone back to Mad, but I doubt it

I'm probably just misremembering when they got Don Martin, thought there were some other MAD guys that went with him for some reason

no, that was a big and solo deal - iirc Cracked didn't generally grant copyright but they made the exception to snag Martin. and only because he'd already walked from Mad over royalties - it wasn't a headhunting per se.

(actually if Mort Todd was still editor then he might have relaxed copyright policies generally - I think he and Clowes own The Uggly Family)

but they made the exception to snag Martin.

fascinating stuff ..

this is proper 'mad men' styled politics but with fat noses as opposed to ... well, you figure the rest out ..

http://therealalfrede.blogspot.ca/2013/03/the-real-alfred-e.html

Film Comment on Mad's movie parodies:

http://filmcomment.com/article/mad-magazine-movie-parodies

r.i.p. bob clarke:

http://www.newsfromme.com/2013/04/01/bob-clarke-r-i-p/

This has to be one of the most trenchant and cutting(and clever) political gags(on the cover, even) they've done in, what, decades?

https://scontent-b-sea.xx.fbcdn.net/hphotos-frc3/1236155_10151609688931596_802093778_n.jpg

Al Feldstein has passed

https://twitter.com/AP/status/461582993648545792

ah man RIP. thanks for the excellent comics. the art book that came out recently was great.

great interview.

Hey, does anyone remember a piece in Mad from the early-mid 80s that was like "honest stickers on albums" that had lots of sick burns on Springsteen, and Stevie Nicks solo albums, and Stevie Wonder's Musiquarium was a rip-off for anyone who had his albums? And (and this is a longshot) anyone remember which issue it might have been, or somewhere I can find it online?

There were at least 2 installments, of which the second ran in Mad #270 - which includes Springsteen ("This may be your last chance to enjoy this artist before marriage turns him into a wimp").

First installment: Mad #262 - this one with Stevie Nicks ("Solo album by member of a hit group. One artist out of five means album is only one-fifth as good").

holy shit - thank you so much sebastian!

i swear i have never stopped thinking about that stevie nicks one

Wow, this is critical:

Al Jaffee Explains How Mad Magazine Made American Humor Jewish

The adamant refusal of the editors to explain the made-up word became a running joke. Today, Mad scholars theorize that potrzebie was in fact based on a Polish word that Kurtzman discovered on a jar of aspirin. According to Jaffee, though, this is not the case: “There was an expression in Lithuania when I was a kid — “putz-rebbe.” Harvey must have heard that. Putz is genitals and it is applied as an insult to the rebbe. It’s like saying, ‘Oh that stupid teacher’ or ‘putz-rebbe.’”

Reaching mass new readerships and training them to laugh at and challenge broader trends, Mad Magazine can be seen as a central force destabilizing mainstream platforms, and at times doing so from a Jewish American perspective. And as Jaffee pointed out, not only were they writers and artists taking down the mainstream world, they were also “making fun of ourselves. We made fun of a certain kind of Yiddishkeit just by using these words. Farshimmelt. Furshlugenner. Potrzebie.” Yet in the act of satirizing both worlds, the magazine transformed itself into a mainstream American voice. And in its evolution, Mad taught its broad readership to be more comfortable with New York Jewish culture. By the 1970s and 1980s, the writers’ rooms in virtually every sitcom on American TV were filled with men who had grown up reading Mad. If “Seinfeld” became the number one show in suburban Texas or in Boise, Idaho, it was in part because Mad had paved the way.

Read more: http://forward.com/culture/yiddish-culture/333672/al-jaffee-explains-how-mad-magazine-made-american-humor-jewish/#ixzz410y84BXE

Jack Davis valentines

https://twitter.com/DennisThePerrin/status/831536083624194049

Bought my first Mad in 25 years and I’m going to read this bastard cover-to-cover pic.twitter.com/9rQNVDIDvA

— Matt Prigge (@mattprigge) August 10, 2018

theoretically v intersted in looking at an issue of the Morrison / Goertz Brand New Gang Of Idiots era but literally never occurs to me to go and find a place that sells it

I've spent the last few days since I saw this photo trying to work out what the lion's facial expression reminds me of, realized this morning that it's one of those Mad Magazine covers where someone gags at the sight of Alfred E Neuman

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/DqshkTKV4AEax75.jpg

https://i.pinimg.com/originals/99/90/84/999084d8727a6b63d98e3809fd603985.jpg

whom amongst us is actually too young to know about this storied publication

no one who should be president

harsh! I mean you could say that about everything in these current issues. And you’d probably be right. But if they’re making them they might as well get Martin in there imo.

is there anything else in the issues being sold on the fan favourite status of its illustrator, rather than the topic, tho



(I haven't seen them and I don't know if there are Martin strips about greed and I strongly agree in principle that Martin strips would likely be a good thing to have in themed grab-bag Mad compilations if they fit the theme. BUT)

I still recall how epochal a moment it was when Martin jumped ship for Cracked (thankfully at a time when I was regularly buying both, like any proper preadolescent of that era).

sic presumably the only people buying these are the nostalgic superfans like me so your suggestion that “fan favourite” artists would be of no account to the compilers is a strange one by my lights

Newsstand distribution is an insanely inefficient way of reaching superfans in 2022!

(who are not yet dead but tbf old enough to have forgotten that they bought the three-volume HC box set of their favourite artist in 2007)

Almost by definition it is only able to reach casual fans at best — how would a superfan even know what was being released, let alone where to find it? — and theming the collections on subject seems designed specifically to appeal to a general audience on top of nostalgists.

70th anniversary issue is out now, with much more new material than usual, including a COVID-19 gag from Sergio Aragones! Nice letter from Jordan Peele about the fake Mad cover they mocked up for Nope, and a nice letter from Weird Al about his favorite ever Al Jaffee gag. Also: a DOUBLE fold-in!

Yeah, really nice issue with a good balance between old and new stuff, although should've been more Kurtzman Kontent. In a way it would be a good one to go out on (I think this is the last time Kuper is going to be doing new Spy v Spy material?)

i would like to see sergio get a National Arts Medal

Happy 102nd Birthday, Al Jaffee!

Fold-in reveals he's only 12.

loll

vg+

Haha

:(

I'm very sad to report that the great Al Jaffee has died. He had celebrated his 102nd birthday just last month. An incredible legend. RIP to a giant of cartooning. pic.twitter.com/FzZk7wGebd

— Tom Heintjes (@Hoganmag) April 10, 2023

Hero.

And as noted on the obit thread, what a perfect followup comment to that tweet:

I will fold his obituary into thirds to reveal a totaly different, and mildly offensive, obituary.

— MP (@DefaultComics) April 10, 2023

And flights of angels sing thee to thy rest.

Angles, surely.

God better not have any stupid questions.

Snappy Answers To St Peter's Questions

^ already txted to an ilx0r so count it as an xp if you like