To Use Or Not To Use

Wednesday Advertising Day.

As I promised last week, I will use the tradition advertising post on Wednesday to show your some of the stuff Craig Yoe and I didn't include in Behaving Madly, the Mad Magazine Imitation book coming out from IDW one of these days. Craig and I will be signing the first copies at the IDW booth at the San Diego Comic Con on Friday from 1 to 2.

Going through all the magazines involved, it struck me taht some movies and some tv shows were parodied more often than others. In the book we included one parody of the Glen Ford movie Blackboard Jungle, a marvelous piece by Art Gates for Crazy, Man, Crazy. But there were also parodies of this movie in Snafu (by Russ Heath) and Mad itself. Of course we couldn't use the Mad parody (by Walace Wood) and the Russ Heath one was printed very badly in all of the samples we found. And fortunately we were able to include a lot more terrific stuff by Heath anyway.

Another tv phenomenon spoofed a lot was the $64.000. Before the fraud scandal broke, many people were suspicious of the program. And some pretty good artists were involved. Ross Andru did one for Lunatickle in the style of Kurtzman's Mad magazine parodies, Mike Sekowsky a more illustrative one for Cockeyed and even Art Gates got into the game with a short parody for Crazy, Man, Crazy. We ended up using none of them, because Andru's was a bit too long (so we included a funny image from one of his other long parodies), Mike Sekowsky's not funny enough (but we did include a large illustration from it) and Art Gates was already given his due.

This may seem unfortunate, but I think it worked out fine. The book represents the best of the genre and is already being reviewed positively for some of it's more unique surprises. If we would have filled the book with sample after sample it would have hurt the impact from the ones we do have. In the forty page introduction I have taken care to describe every title so you will know what's in what and if you want to go and buy some more, you will know what to choose. That way we have hopefully made a book that caters to the collectors and the unitiated in an equal way.

But enough with the apologies, here are the stories.

Open The Gates

Wednesday Advertising Day.

Art Gates is in my new book on Mad imitators Behaving Madly with quite a spectacular parody of the movie Blackboard Jungle with Glen Ford. It was done in the style of Harvey Kurtzman's Mad magazine parodies and it's very well drawn. At the same time cartoonist Gates was drawing romance comics in a much more realistic style, based on John Prentice's version of Alex Raymond's Rip Kirby. And he was not far away from selling a daily newspaper cartoon about his time in the army. And he had just done a four issue series of Hillbilly comics for Charlton in a style that could be called similar to Mort Drucker's movie parody style, altough Drucker hadn't invented that style yet at that point. All of these things I have shown here before and you can find them by following the link. Tat will also lead you to a series of cartoon style 'sponsored' newspaper strips featuring a Milkman. Recently I came across a longer run of these ad gags, so here they are.

Style Du Jour

Monday Cartoon Day.

The editor of the Lebanon Times liked to buy new features. All through the run of the paper, you see weird and rare strips pop up, often to be scrapped after a year or so. In 1957 they were running Art Gates Service Smiles, some of which I have shown before. Art Gates was a journeyman artist, who moved from a Rip Kirby influenced realistic style to his more natural cartoon style, with a little bit of Li'l Abner in between. He also worked on the Mad magazine imitation Crazy, where he may even have subcontracted a whole issue. In the early sixties he ran a gag strip and panel service that had it's own newsletter. Then, in NOvember, they ad another panel, which I had never seen before. It is called The Muffins and is one of George Crenshaw's earliest efforts at creating a series of his own, after a succesful career as a magazine cartoonist all through the fifties. He did hit paydirt until later with the strip Nubbin, about a country boy. In 1962 he created a panel called Belvedere, about a very stylish dog. Crenshaws style was a bit like that of Hank Ketcham, which shows best here in his very Dennis the Menace like panel and in his magazine work just before that. In the late fifties, that's the style that newspapers wanted and Crenshaw delivered. Like Ketcham, he had started at Disney in the late thirties and early forties. They may even have know each other although nothing is known about that (or about Crenshaw ever ghosting for Ketcham). On Belvedere, Crenshaw's style is more like that of Henry Boltinoff, who incidentally, took over Nubbin, when the double workload became too much for Crenshaw (or the succes of Belvedere big enough).