Crime Department Of The Shadow!

The Shadow was enough of a cultural icon in 1953 that Harvey Kurtzman and Will Elder thought nothing of bringing a swinging satire of the radio and pulp star to the pages of MAD Magazine. He even rated the cover of the fourth issue of the iconoclastic comic rendered by Kurtzman himself. 

Elder was Kurtzman's go-to artist on MAD, the guy who got the highest profile assignments. So the Shadow was seen as a property the fan base of the up-and-coming comic would know and relate to  immediately. The story focuses on the relationship between the Shadow and Margot Lane, here redubbed "Margo Pain". The Shadow himself is renamed "Lamont Shadowskeedeebooboom" for what it's worth.

Elder's wonderfully vibrant art filled to the brim with "chicken fat" makes for wonderful reading. To read the rest of this story check out this link.  This one like many other MAD parodies has been reprinted many times. I own it at least thrice in volumes I've collected over the decades. These MAD satires are sturdy items that weather the rigors of time quite well. 

Enjoy your Halloween Eve and check in at the Dojo tomorrow for an all-day Shadow celebration. 

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Peep!

Peep!*

*In these "woke" times, the misadventures of Little Annie Fanny seem so the products of bygone eras. But like so many things from benighted days gone by, new thinking doesn't make the products of old thinking any less entertaining in their way. I'm not a fan of expurgating work to make it palatable for more sensitive times. To truly know history, we must archive it and entertain as it is.

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Ping Pong!

King Kong was a movie like few others. It spawned an immediate sequel which while entertaining in its own way lacked the emotional power and scale of the original. Some years later there was Mighty Joe Young about a great big gorilla and a girl, but happy endings don't make for monster movies. What Kong had not had was a spirited satire, a send up of the tropes and oddities which populate the film. Well leave it to the boys at MAD to solve that problem with the sixth issue of the comic.

Harvey Kurtzman was large and in charge as he and the inimitable Will Elder took hold of the modern myth of "The Eighth Wonder of the World" and gave us "Ping Pong". To read the awesome "Ping Pong" check out this overstuffed link. You'll be glad you did.

If you'd like to own the story, it was reprinted most recently to my knowledge in the Will Elder volume of the MAD's "Original Idiot" set which also featured Wally Wood and Jack Davis. I have the story in a larger format in a tome which reprints the first six issues of the venerable magazine.

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A Goodman Is Fun To Read!

After leaving MAD, the collapse of the abbreviated Trump, and the cancellation of Humbug, Harvey Kurtzman had one more go at a humor magazine, this time called appropriately enough Help! from Warren Publishing.  (for more on Help! check this link out) In the pages of Help he and Will Elder launched the ongoing adventures of a character who had been introduced in The Jungle Book, one Goodman Beaver. Goodman was a naive everyman who wanders the Earth for the sake of finding a world which is more corrupt than he imagines it to be but who himself is never marked by that corruption. 

The adventures of Goodman have been collected twice, once in the early 60's and later by Kitchen Sink. Both times the Archie parody had to be altered or  pulled  from the collection because of impending lawsuits by the editors over Riverdale. It's a shame as to any clever eye a lampoon only serves to ultimately promote a product. Here is the story in more detail.

Goodman Beaver gave way though in time to another Kurtzman-Elder creation, the bouncy Little Annie Fanny who became a staple (pun intended) of Playboy for a few decades. She was Goodman Beaver with boobs, a naif who is captured in a dirty world and falls into the clutches of those who would do all sorts of things to her if they could.

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Humbugs!

After Mad, after Trump, there came Humbug. It was Image Comics decades before the launch of that later more famous brand. When Harvey Kurtzman left Mad for a host of reasons, he had a scheme with Hugh Hefner to launch Trump another magazine in the Mad mode but slicker and upscale. It lapsed after a mere two issues, so Kurtzman and the talent he'd assembled to produce Trump were left without a gig. So they decided to make their own gig, and pooled their money and became not only talent but owners of their own magazine. That magazine they named Humbug and in some of the most desperate times in American publishing history they launched.

With distribution avenues limited they sought a partner in Charlton Comics, a likely  mobbed-up operation which had its own distribution system in addition to publications. And for eleven issues spread over 1957 and 1958 Humbug hit the stands. The magazine was oddly sized for its first many issues and so landed somewhere between regular mags and comics and it cost more to book than did comics. It was not in full color, but that was not necessarily a hindrance. Mad was a hit and it was in black and white and Trump had been in color and apparently failed to find an audience, or enough of one fast enough. So Humbug tumbled along for nearly two years before the end and in those eleven issues Kurtzman and his gang of talented artists such as Jack Davis, Arnold Roth, Will Elder, and Al Jaffee made a pretty funny mag. Here is a much more detailed description of how Humbug came into being by Bill Schelly from his biography of Kurtzman.

Even while Humbug was still running, Kurtzman made a deal with Ballantine Books (which had just lost Mad reprints to Signet) to reprint some Humbug material in paperback form. It didn't have the same success alas.

Several years ago Fantagraphics reprinted the eleven issues of Humbug in two handsome volumes. They sport new covers, one by Al Jaffee and another by Arnold Roth.

I came into this world in 1957, so reading a magazine which so resolutely satirizes the events of that year and the next is a fascinating window in to the time I was born into.

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MAD's Original Idiots - Will Elder!

Of all of the original MAD artists, Will Elder is the one I'm least familiar with. I've seen plenty of his work over the decades, but in my formative years he was not all that present in the publications I got hold of. His work in Playboy with Harvey Kurtzman on Annie Fanny was not material I would see until I was an adult and so I didn't have a grasp of who he was or what he contributed to the whole look and feel of early MAD. I read others wax on about his amazing images full of something weirdly called "Chicken Fat" but I never really grokked what that meant until later.

Like the other great artists in this collection, Elder was there from the very beginning, his hectic energetic panels filling up at story in the debut issue.

But when I think of Elder, I think of the amazing spoof of the noxious Mickey Mouse from Disney. The gag on Donald Duck in this sample page goes right to the heart. In the modern day, Mickey and his friends have been reduced to brands, but when Kurtzman and Elder took them on, this was only beginning to be the case, but it was clearly the direction nonetheless.

Perhaps my favorite Elder story, aside from his great Mandrake and delicous Wonder Woman spoofs is the oft reprinted "Starchie". The pure-hearted naifs of Riverdale were the ideal targets for the MAD treatment.

Elder was an artist who influenced a generation of underground talents who went on to redefine the comics form. Elder himself was somewhat hidden away at Playboy for most of my reading life, but upon discovering the master of "Chicken Fat" at last, I'm very glad I did.

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Presidential Strippers!

This is an amazing artifact! This 1986 jam poster features Ronald and Nancy Reagan (rendered by Mort Drucker) at the center of a gargantuan gaggle of comic strip and comic book characters rendered by the original artists who created and promoted them. For a cool $12,750 bucks this can be yours. For more details check out this link. The talent is amazing and the signatures alone are epic. There's Jack Kirby, Stan Lee, Mort Drucker, Charles Shulz, Sergio Aragones, Will Elder, Al Jaffee, and many more.

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Not The Trump You're Thinking Of!

Most magazines that flame out after only two issues would likely not be all that memorable or significant. That's not the case with Harvey Kurtzman's Trump, a magazine he produced briefly for Playboy publisher Hugh Hefner. After his split from William Gaines Jr. and MAD magazine, Kurtzman was casting about for his next gig and already had a scheme worked up with Hefner to produce a satire magazine. To that end he brought with him several of the original MAD talents and for two dazzling installments they made a go of it.

But for complicated reasons, some having to do with the compulsive personalities of both Kurtzman and Hefner and some having to do with the simple rigors of publishing finance, the book only lasted for two issues. Kurtzman and his gang went on to other gigs, and of course Hefner's success is well documented. But Trump was a failure, at least financially.

The intention with Trump was to repeat the wild satirical energy of MAD but in a slick magazine format. The features in the debut are a weird blend of what one might've discovered in a typical issue of MAD along with somewhat more visually exotic devices using photographs. There's a wacky fold-out in this first issue, which spoofs the infamous fold-outs of the sister magazine Playboy. Oddly Alfred E. Neuman makes a cameo in this feature. The little figure who adorns the cover is called "The Knave" and many suggest this spare cover style, an apparent attempt to separate the magazine from its inspiration MAD is one reason the magazine failed to find an audience. That would be true if if in fact the magazine had not sold well, but it did.

The second issue has a cover which is even less visually robust than the first one, almost a negative companion. It was not the plan for there to be only two issues, there was a third in production when the cancellation of the mag came abruptly and from Hefner himself to a gobsmacked Kurtzman. Stories vary, some suggest it was merely financial hijinks which doomed Trump, but Hefner himself later indicated he was unhappy with the magazine. Whatever the case, he was not especially unhappy with Kurtzman, as he hired him along with Will Elder to draw Little Annie Fannie for a few decades, some years after Trump folded.

Having looked at the first two issues of this magazine, thanks to the great Dark Horse reprint tome which is filled with explanatory notes by Denis Kitchen, I can see what Kurtzman wanted to create. He'd keep trying, but the magazine of his dreams wouldn't come along for a few more decades and it would be by other folks inspired by MAD no doubt, but younger men and they'd call it The National Lampoon.

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The Maddest Heap!

In a strange and bewildering coincidence, the MADmen Harvey Kurtzman (writer) and  Will Elder (artist) concocted their own "Heap" in the pages of EC's famous satire comic.

This is a Heap in a spoof titled "Outer Sanctum" made not of moss and swamp detritus, but of garbage and the refuse and steaming chemicals of modern man, it's most powerful aspect is the awesome smell.

It happened in the pages of MAD #5, the cover seen above by Elder gives no hint of the Heap's murky presence. To read the story of the MAD Heap, go here and enjoy! All this Heap wants to do is get along.

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Mad's Original Idiots!

Found these one day at the local comics shop and scooped them up. I own some of these stories more than a few times, but others I don't own at all. These are outstanding little collections brimming with the most chaotic of the artwork by Wally Wood, Will Elder, and Jack Davis produced for MAD's early formative years.

At first I was only going to get the Wally Wood volume then I found this slipcase for all three and just bit down hard on the bullet. I'm glad I did. I'm keeping them on the nightstand until I devour them all, proper bits of winter tinder.

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It's A Mad Mad Mad Mad Paperback!

The Mad Reader is one of those truly important books. EC Comics made a big splash in the heyday of comics, both critically and financially. So much so, that the furor around them eventually caused them to disappear from the comic racks. But MAD survived, and in fact thrived for decades after becoming a cultural touchstone for millions of kids trying to find a way to interpret adult society. Soon after its sales success in the early 50's, Ballantine Books stepped forward to bring the distinctive humor brand to a broader audience in the first paperback comic book reprint, The Mad Reader. The Mad Reader, first published in 1954 went through many editions and spawned many subsequent collections.

A little over a decade ago IBooks under the direction of the late Byron Preiss returned these vintage classics to the market in handsome and faithful reproductions. As you can see, the leering mug of Alfred P. Neuman guarantees MAD-level quality. In point of fact, this was the first time that Alfred's famous puss ever graced a MAD publication, but as we all know it be far from the last.

IBooks went on quickly to publish other of the 50's MAD paperbacks. Some years ago, I found numbers two through five for a neat discount, but despaired at ever discovering the first volume. A few days ago I stumbled across it. There are later volumes in this esteemed series, but these five from Ballantine Books (MAD moved to Signet with the sixth volume) are the core upon which the long MAD paperback tradition lives. It's exceedingly neat to have these clever reproductions in my sweaty mitts at long last.

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