LizzieMaine
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Yeah, I paid about twenty for mine, and it was a deal. It's going to take a while to get the rest of them but time I've got.
Continuing my comics kick with "The MAD Archives: Volume 1."
I've always been a fan of the original four-color comic book "Mad" that preceded the black-and-white magazine format familiar to Boomers and their progeny, but I've never been overly impressed with the various attempt to collect these twenty three issues, attempts which have been too spotty, too shabby, or too expensive for my tastes. But I stumbled across the first volume of an officially-sanctioned hardcover reissue published in 2005, and after a quick glance snapped it right up.
DC Comics now owns the whole fershlugginer MAD operation, and that did give me pause -- their "Archives Edition" hardcover program has not particularly impressed me, with poor reproduction of the line art and oversaturated recoloring efforts having pretty much put me off the series. But this MAD reissue is done right -- the pages are reproduced at the full size of the original published issues and are shot from original negatives. I'd have preferred a less bright-white paper stock, but it's not that awful glossy stuff other DC Archives books have used, and the coloring isn't overly aggressive. So it's a nice book to look at, and it doesn't get in the way of appreciating the drawings.
And that's absolutely essential, because the comic-book MAD had extremely dense, detailed art. Will Elder and Wally Wood, in particular, crammed their panels with hidden gags, non-sequitirs, one-liners, and background weirdness that demand close examination for full impact. I've always loved Elder's MAD work, because it's art that could not possibly have been done by anyone else, anywhere, ever. He was a singular talent, and his MAD pieces are the very essence of nose-thumbing, up-yours aggressive satire directed straight at the overripe, slopped-over buttocks of Early 1950s America. Wood, too, is a genius in his own way, but while Elder is a loony madman on a rampage with a pencil, Wood is a craftsman, whose pages are as carefully and intricately designed as they are funny.
The thing I never knew about the comic-book MAD is that the entire run -- all twenty three issues -- were written by one person, the extraordinary Harvey Kurtzman. He was the odd man out at EC -- he hated the horror comics that gave the company its reputation, and preferred to work on the company's line of war comics, magazines that were explicitly *anti* war at a time when pacifism was not, as they say, politically correct. Publishing pacifist war comics at the height of the Korean conflict was not a growth field -- except among actual soldiers, who by all indications loved them -- and EC ended up cancelling the books and giving Kurtzman MAD to keep him busy. He more than carried the load, filling the issues with genre parodies, social commentary, and trenchant satire. This first volume contains full reproductions -- minus paid ads -- of MAD issues 1 thru 6, from late 1952 into 1953, and you see Kurtzman starting out unsure of quite what he wants to do with the platform he's been given. But by the time "Superduperman," a vicious swipe at you-know-who, appears in issue 4, the gloves are off and MAD is well and truly launched.
I'm not at a time where I can throw a lot of money around on books, but I'm going to be grabbing cheap copies of the remaining three volumes as soon as I can. We need to laugh right now, and it's a shame Harvey Kurtzman isn't around anymore to make it happen. But his work, as insane as ever, lives on in these volumes, and I'm looking forward to the rest of them.
Pegasus runs tomorrow. A stack of data to sift through tonite.
After a long time I'm back.
Welcome back Martin. How is the Law ?
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