Best of the Usual Gang of Idiots

n/a OTM til that last post

No Basil Wolverton?

Al Jaffee had the best paperbacks

Whiney FTW! Wolverton in a heartbeat, no second thoughts. Can't believe I didn't think of him earlier.

Plus, WTF me for bad-mouthing Jaffee and Drucker.

No love for Paul Coker? :(

Or Jack Rickard for that matter?

I submitted an article to Mad once.

Wolverton only made a v. few contributions to Mad, and his best work (ie Powerhouse Pepper) was done elsewhere.

It seems mad (ahem) to include Gaines but not Al Feldstein, who actually edited MAD for something like thirty years.

Aragones is Spanish, not Mexican.

I agree w/ Elvis Telecom that Paul Coker is seriously underappreciated - a beautifully distinctive line, and actual funny drawings too. Jack Rickard (and other 2nd-stringers like George Woodbridge and Bob Clark) on the other hand - ugh.

The correct answer is of obv Harvey Kurtzman, cos apart from actually creating MAD he 's also prob. the greatest American cartoonist/writer+editor of all time.

I've only seen MAD v. infrequently over the last ten years or so, but you do get the odd piece by Drew Friedman who deserves to be on this list more than say Porges or Edwing

Interestingly and somewhat unusually Gaines paid his writers exactly the same rates as the artists, so it seems a bit harsh to exclude them from the poll. Dick De Bartolo, for example, holds the record (unlikely to ever be broken) for most consecutive contributions to the mag.

Aragones is Spanish, not Mexican.

According to Wikipedia he was born in Spain but his family emigrated to Mexico due to the Spanish Civil War when he was just a little kid, and he lived there until 1962 when he moved to the US. So I wasn't totally wrong there.

kurtzman! kurtzman! kurtzman!!

i am so glad someone repped for paul coker though

When I was about 10 years old, and bedridden with illness, I wrote Al Jaffee a letter, and he wrote me back and included a "get well soon" cartoon. It was the coolest thing of all time. And during some traumatic military brat move, it got lost :(

When I visited New York when I was about 12, I showed up on the doorstep of 485 MADison Avenue and asked for a tour, and they seemed strangely taken aback - but they gave me one, and I met Bill Gaines! I was in utter heaven.

RIP Bob Clark. Not my favorite of the gang, but worth noting nevertheless.

Whoa, I meant to revive this today for a wholly different reason! I just tore through Al Jaffee's biography and it was amazing. I figured it'd be like the Gaines and Kurtzman books, mostly about grownup artistic life and work, but really 2/3rds or so of the book details his life before high school. And justly so! His parents were Lithuanian immigrants, and after having four boys in six years, his mom decided to move just her and the boys back to Lithuania, largely to be closer to Jewish traditions she was comfortable with. Al, the oldest, picks up some Yiddish and deals with culture shock (and his mom's religious proclivities for giving all their money away instead of feeding her boys), and a year later dad smuggles the crew home. Then mom moves her & the boys back to Lithuania AGAIN, this time for five or so years. Al hears a crying shop full of his neighbors bemoaning the arrival of Hitler the same day dad comes to re-rescue them, although mom and the youngest boy stay behind. The second to youngest brother was rendered deaf and mute by a disease, which pops never learned, and when they get back to the States at the height of the great depression, the boys all have to live with random relatives, shuffled from house to house. I am not giving anything away, it's all way more enthralling than just this bare skeleton. Al is a real no-bullshit artist and hearing how this youth turned him into the satirist and artist he became ––– just, wow.

RIP Jack Davis

People still alive who contributed to EC comics = Marie Severin, Angelo Torres... anyone else?

Al Jaffee started at MAD while Kurtzman was still editor, but after it converted to magazine format, if that counts. 95 and still doing the fold-in almost every month.

(Jaffee and DeBartolo were on Gilbert Gottfried's podcast together a few weeks ago, btw thread)

Yeah, I'm never sure if those early MAD magazines count as EC comics (they probably still say (c)EC on the indicias). Nick Meglin might also qualify, too.

D'oh, Russ Heath.

Sergio is still alive

he didn't do EC

Moved to America in '62, comics line closed in '55, Kurtzman left Mad in '56.

I don't have any idea about EC or non-EC MAD, but Bill Elder is the correct answer for me.

Elder, being so professionally conjoined with Kurtzman, was in the comics, apart from some 1980s post-LAF painted or grey-airbrushed faded glory returns as WEHK.

Happy 100th, Al Jaffee!

So glad he made it. Jaffee now generally agreed to be the longest-lived American comic book artist.

AL JAFFEE 100

AL00

Is today Al Jaffee’s hundredth birthday?

No, the candle store was having a buy one, get 99 free sale.

No, he always walks around tooting a horn and wearing a paper hat.

No, it’s Shakespeare’s birthday, everyone makes that mistake.

Happy @jaffee100!

Art by Drew Friedman pic.twitter.com/SR2S4FFoae

— Michael Tisserand (@m_tisserand) March 13, 2021

An excellent article in the Chicago Reader about cartoonist Johnny Sampson being, at press, the last MAD artist standing (including lots of Jaffee content).

RIP Frank Jacobs:

Longtime MAD magazine writer Frank Jacobs passed away this morning at the age of 91. When Harvey Kurtzman stepped down as editor of MAD and was replaced by Al Feldstein, Frank was the first writer Feldstein bought material from and over the years, he and subsequent editors bought a lot of it from Frank.

That first piece of his for MAD appeared in #33, cover-dated June of 1957. He had work in 312 issues, making him the seventh most-prolific contributor to the magazine ever. (Beating him out: Jaffee, Aragonés, DeBartolo, Drucker, Coker and Berg.) Frank's last new work seems to have been in #529, cover-dated October of 2014. Work of his is reprinted in almost every issue of the last few years.