Mad As Mad Can Be

Friday Comic Book Day.

Three months after it was published my book Behaving Madly keeps selling well and getting good reviews. The last one by Steve Heller, formerly of the Nwe Tork Times and New York Times Bok Review. Here is a page by Don Orehek I ended up not using. It was for the Not Mad section and was on eof two pieces Irehek did directly copying a Mad feature or artist. In this case A Movie Scene We'd Like To See by Interlandi, which was initiated by Harvey urtzman in his magazine version of Mad and later continued in Al Feldstein's 'regular' Mad.

If you haven't got my and Craig Yoe's book about Mad magazine imitations yet, yu can get your copy in Amazon by using the link on the right. it will even make me three cents, I believe. You can also buy it in Craig's store (www.yoebooks.com) or ask your own bookstore. The more people get to see this book, the better.

Random Cartoonery

Monday Cartoon Day.

Laff-a-Day was the 'other' daily cartoon panel after This Funny World, using slightly less upscale cartoons and cartoonists. But if anything like it was in the papers today, it would be one of the first things I would go for. Funny to see how later on in the sixties Henri Boltinoff, Orlando Busino and Don Orehek were frequent contributors.

Scouting for Gold

Monday Cartoon Day.

I think it was Ron Harris who alerted me to the fact that all of Boy's Life is now available on Google Books. I have a large run of issues from the fifties, but scanning stuff from them has always been a large and timeconsuming project I have put off as long as I could. Now with the whole run available, I could finally start showing you some of the rare gems hidden in this longrunning monthly. The comic section of Boy's Scout started appearing in late 1952 and was produced by the comic strip advertising company of Johnstone and Cushing. Or if it wasn't there must have been a connection, because much of the same artists are used. From the start, there is a prominent role for Greig Flessel and many of the feature are signed Alsten or Al Stenzel, although he doesn't seem to have done anything himself. Instead he uses a string of ghost artists, especially on the longrunning (but not continuously) sf strip Space Conquerors. Space Conquerors is best know as being drawn by Lou Fine, but this was only later in his career. In the late fifties, for a long time this was the work of ex EC talent George Evans, who also did a lot of boy scout features for the comic sections. When Flessel got his own newspaper strip David Crane (or at least took it over from it's originator Winslow Mortimer) Irv Novick and Tom Scheuer (later Sawyer) took over. In he magazine, the stories were illustrated by many familiar illustration names, with occasionally a name we know from the comcis, such as Bernie Krigstein or Jerry Robinson. But we'll get there and I'll cover Dik Bowne too. But first we delve into the cartoons that were featured in this magazine. Many people worked for Boy's Life over the years.I have singled out one of my favorites (and my fiend Mike Lynch's): Orlando Busino. I have yet to find his first appearnce, but here is a selection of his work in the early sixties. After that, a few of the others from the same time period. I opened this post with a specialty drawing by nne other than Charles Schulz. I guess everyone wanted to be a boyscout back then.