The Incomplete History of Mad THE COMIC BOOK!

This is something I probably should have posted early in my postings of Mad THE COMIC BOOK, but here's a little secret...until last Wednesday, I actually didn't have the complete run of the comics...heehee.

Well, now I do (thanks to Amazon) and now the entire story of William Gaines, Harvey Kurtzman and that first usual gang of idiots (Bill Elder, Wally Wood, Jack Davis, John Severin and Basil Wolverton) can be told.  My copies that I've been scanning of all of these comics cornerstones and masterpieces, are not from the original comics, but rather from a magazine that Mad and it's now owner DC Comics put out in the late 90's, and within these 8 issues of genius a companion article was published called "The Incomplete History of Mad Comics" that was written by the legendary Frank Jacobs, called the most prolific writer in Mad MAGAZINE history.  He joined the gang of idiots in 1957, and what better person to write the story of the beginning of modern American History.  

And I don't joke when I say that...I believe that if it weren't for Mad Magazine appearing at the time that it did (and continuously puncturing pomposity till today) what we now know as comedy in movies, music, comics and TV would be a very different, much less irreverent, and much more tame brand of larfs.

dig in kiddoes...time to learn something.

There's still plenty more Mad Mondays to come, still 5 1/2 more issues of the comic book that could not be hushed,

Thank Melvin!

Talk to you soon!

"Meet Miss Potgold!" - Basil Wolverton - Mad Monday!

Basil Wolverton returns to the pages of "Mad" THE COMIC BOOK for a feature only he could draw.  Harvey Kurtzman really knew his arsenal and how to use it.

From the November 1954 issue, here's "Meet Miss Potgold!"

Talk to you soon.

"The Face Upon the Floor!" - Jack Davis & Basil Wolverton - Mad Mondays!

"Mad" THE COMIC BOOK #10 from 1954 continues to unravel with this uber-classic "The Face Upon the Floor". Reading this over and over as a kid was maybe my first exposure to the great Jack Davis and I poured over every panel (in it's black and white reprint glory) and memorized whole passages of the H. Antoine D'Arcy poem.

I wasn't yet hip to the idea of a "cartoonist jam", so that last panel was always assumed to be by Davis as well. Little did I know that that was my first exposure to Basil Wolverton as well.

Also his first work for Harvey Kurtzman and Bill Gaines in the annals of Mad.

Great stuff! Enjoy!

Talk to you soon.

Basil Wolverton Goes Mad!

...or I should rather say, "Mad goes Basil Wolverton!". Mad Magazine that is...I mean...Mad, the comic book.

For those not in the know, Mad, "Humor in a Jugular Vein", that stalwart companion of all good subversive juveniles and adults for generations. "What, Me Worry?", stepping-stone to Harvard AND National Lampoon and all around funny f***ing magazine, began as a comic book. Just another book in the stable of EC Comics, famous for their lines of horror and science fiction and war comics, this was their foray into humor. Written by Harvey Kurtzman and drawn by folks like Jack Davis, Wally Wood, John Severin and Will (then just plain Bill) Elder, Mad (the comic book) debuted in 1952 and was an instant success with delinquents of all ages. After 24 issues it became the great magazine you knew as a kid and hopefully still do today, but it was a really great comic first.

Basil Wolverton only contributed to Mad about a dozen times, but his style was so recognizable and loved by the readers, he was forever linked to it. He was even once called the "Michealangelo of Mad".

His first contribution was a single panel (the last panel actually, the punchline to the whole story) in Mad #10 in an adaptation of a poem "The Face Upon the Barroom Floor" that was drawn by Jack Davis. Jack Davis is a force to be reckoned with in the cartooning world, so for Wolverton to not only add to his art, but trump it for the sake of the punch, is remarkable unto itself.

Here's the final series of panels from that story. Hurmmm. Methinks it wouldn't be a bad idea to post some of these great Mad stories in their entirety here. Huuuurrrrrrrrm.

Wolverton's big splash came with Mad #11 when he was the chosen cover artist in a parody of photo mags of the day like "Life". This is an image thats been in my head for decades and that's a tribute to basil in itself.

The parody is carried on with the inside cover, Basil once again sharing page space with the great Jack Davis.

If that didn't solidify Basil Wolverton's footprints in the firmament of Mad, he also contributed art to this Kurtzman overview of the readers of Mad, "The Mad Reader".

Wolverton is fully into his "Spaghetti & Meatballs" style here. Love it or hate it, guaranteed you have an opinion of it, and that's a good definition of art.

Enjoy!

That orta take care of my wind-baggery. That Zippo lighter find made me realize just how much Wolverton I had laying around here. I'm far and away from the biggest fan he had or has and even farther from being an expert on his work, but wasn't all this Wolverton better than watching "Jersey Shore" of "Glee"?

I think so too.

Talk to you soon.

Li'l Abner Meets Basil Wolverton

Back to my celebration of the work of Basil Wolverton (see last weeks posts) in honor of my "Bitchin'!", "Boss!", "Cool!" acquisition of a Basil Wolverton Zippo, we come to 1946 and a storyline in Al Capp's "Li'l Abner" comic strip.

The most hideously ugly woman (person?) ever born, Lena the Hyena was bound for Dogpatch to join in the Sadie Hawins Day race and pledged to nab Abner for her very own betrothed. For those not familiar with the strips Sadie Hawkins Day other than your own Jr. High School memories of a dance where the girls ask the guys, this is where the tradition began. Annually the women of Dogpatch would chase the men of Dogpatch from sun up to sun down or until the femme's caught the mook o' their dreams to be hitched by Marryin' Sam. The men of Dogpath loathed to think of becoming husbands, not just because most of the women are as hard to look at there as the men are, but because being married meant doing chores instead of loafing all day. Now of course any one of them would have been happy to have been nabbed by Daisy Mae, but she only has eyes for our Abner...but in 1946, so did Lena.

The citizens of the world clamoured to see what Lena looked like, but that would have been too horrid for a family newspaper, said Capp, and so the cartoonist placed a cartoonist into the role of doing the dirty work. None other than Lester Gooch, Al Capp's parody of Chester Gould and artist of Li'l Abner's "ideal", Fearless Fosdick, would be Capp's way out. But even the fictional Gooch had trouble, so to build the suspense and add even more audience involvement, Capp held a contest for the readers to draw the face of Lena the Hyena.

It becomes even more convoluted (and downright fun) as Al Capp's reader contest for his strip is parodied in the strip inside the strip. Gooch has a contest as well and the judges of the most horrid Lena the Hyena picture are Capp's caricatures of Frank Sinatra, Boris Karloff and Salvidor Dali. If your mind isn't twisted enough by this point, supposedly the real Sinatra, Karloff and Dali were the actual judges for Capp!

The winner of the contest was Basil Wolverton. How's that for a roundabout story?

Ah, big time comic strip lore. Magic, I tell ya!

I was going to scan the entire storyline here, but Capp's stories are wonderfully long and rich and I'd be posting almost a years worth. Hemmm, would this be something you blog readers would like at some point? I'd love to re-read some of these and I have access to complete runs of "Li'l Abner" and "Thimble (that's Popeye to you) Theatre" as well as big chunks of "Little Orphan Annie", "Dick Tracy", "Wash Tubbs and Captain Easy", "Krazy Kat" and a slew of others. Let me know and I'll be sure and give it a shot. Hell, I might anyway.

Here's a nice article by Dave Schriener from the forward to Kitchen Sink Press' "Li'l Aber" vol. 12 that focuses of Basil Wolverton. Enjoy!

More of Wolverton in "Mad" tomorrow...back to the article...

Here's a little gallery of the some of the runner's up, also from the same source.

And finally, here's the now infamous strip with Basil's rendition of Lena the Hyena from October 21, 1946.

Talk to you soon.