Number 1126


Superduper-Gookum!


I've heard the first couple of issues of Mad didn't exactly set the comic book buying world on fire. It took a couple more issues for that to happen, and eventually the comic book was selling a million copies an issue. "Blob" from issue #1, and "Gookum" from #2, both by Wood, didn't get the attention of his later strips, like "Superduperman."

To show some of the difference in the respect "Gookum" got as opposed to "Superduperman," in issue #4 (where Mad sales were said to have taken off), Heritage Auctions sold the six pages of original art for "Gookum" in 2002 for $10,925, but in 2009 the splash page only of "Superduperman" went for $43,318.75.

Above is the scan of the original art for the "Superduperman" splash page, and below the whole six-page "Gookum" for you to look at and admire. There's nothing wrong with "Gookum." The earliest issues of Mad were supposedly take-offs on the EC line, so Wood did science fiction stories and Davis did horror spoofs. It was when Mad started spoofing other comic books and television that readers found them.

I was too young to buy those issues of Mad from the stands, but my brother-in-law, Jim, was a high school kid at the time and said Mad was IT, the coolest comic ever. Even in the early '50s comic books were considered kid stuff, beneath the hep kats in high school, except for Mad.

I'm also showing the color version of "Gookum," which I scanned from the Tales Calculated To Drive You Mad Special #1, published in 1997.

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While we're on the subject of EC Comics, I came across this interesting reference to the infamous "Are You A Red Dupe?" ad that ran in EC's titles in mid-1954.

This letter, by T. Bernard Mathews of Reading, PA, was published in the Reading Eagle of May 19, 1954. What Mathews has done is quote directly from the "Red Dupe" ad. (He even perpetuated the misspelling of Wertham's name: it's not "Frederick," but Fredric). "After little reading," he claims early on in his letter. Yes, very little! One page, one ad out of a comic book. That's Bernard's research! I'm not saying the information in the EC page is incorrect, although it does seem a bit odd that they blunted their message with a Mad, or more correctly Panic (i.e., the comic poor Melvin printed is Panisky), satire of Russian censorship.

The ad got publisher William M. Gaines in even more trouble with the Senate committee he testified before. People in that era didn't have a sense of humor about being called red dupes.

I found the letter on the blog, Yesterday's Papers, an amazing site by John Adcock. I recommend it highly.

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Number 855

V-Vampires!

Heritage Auctions offered the original art for the classic EC 3-D reworking of the original version of "V-Vampires" in Mad #3. Here's some of what Heritage said about the story:

Wally Wood Three Dimensional EC Classics "V-Vampires" page 5 Original Art (EC, 1954). For EC's debut into the 3-D craze, four fan-favorite yarns, one from each of the titles, Mad, Weird Science, Frontline Combat, and Crime SuspenStories, were retold in this one-shot, published in the Spring of 1954 . . . The art is rendered on Craftint paper and four pieces of acetate, each piece having art and consecutively numbered pages. The five pieces were then stacked together, with eye-popping results. The 3-D effect is striking, and then there's added attraction of the voluptuous Godiva-- a Wood specialty.

This is the kind of thing that makes me glad to be a comics fan, an EC fan, a Kurtzman fan, a Wood fan...what else do I need to say?

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Number 525


The Doomed G.I. Shmoe Patrol


In the intro to "G.I. Shmoe" in Mad #10, Harvey Kurtzman wrote, "The truce has been signed in Korea! For some time, we have been itching to sink our teeth into one type of literature born of the war!...We think the time has come! Any similarity between this story and real war is totally accidental!...It is with the sincerest respect that we dedicate this lampoon to you real soldiers who have had to put up with the glamorized war comics like...G. I. SHMOE!"


"G.I. Shmoe" is the classic 1954 Kurtzman/Wood story of two soldiers fighting over women and mowing down hordes of Chinese with fists and rifle butts. The Bob Powell story, "The Doomed Patrol," from American Air Forces #7, published by M.E. Comics in 1952, its panels of guys fighting over women and mowing down Chinese, may be the story that Kurtzman saw that led to "G.I. Shmoe". Can I prove it? Naw, but it's an interesting comparison. Inspiration comes from many and varied places. If you've got a copy of Mad #10, or one of the many Mad reprints check out the story after reading "The Doomed Patrol."

I scanned "The Doomed Patrol" from its appearance in the Super Comics reprint, Battle Stories #15, published in 1964.

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Number 189

How I went Mad in the 1950s

As a kid I never kicked and fussed when Mom took me to the grocery store, because it gave me a chance to stand near the magazine rack and paperback book spinner, ogling the sexy covers. On one occasion in 1955 or thereabouts I spotted a book I'd never seen before, The Mad Reader.

I opened it up to the first panel of Wally Wood's "Superduperman" story, and the rest, as they say, is history.

The problem is, as much as I wanted this book, and I wanted it really, really bad, Mom wouldn't buy it for me. Mom was aware of the talk about evil comic books turning children into juvenile delinquents, and while she let me read comic books she approved of (Uncle Scrooge, Little Lulu, etc.), she wasn't about to let me go over the line to something like Mad.

I went home disappointed, then my obsessive-compulsive disorder kicked in. When I wanted something as bad as I wanted this book I usually kept up a whining, obnoxious pleading until my parents caved in. Since Mom had said no, I went to my dad. Dad was usually more easygoing when it came to things like this. Listening to me bellow, snivel and whine for about an hour was all it took. He went to the store to find the book for me.

It's said that Mad, in its original comic book incarnation, was a flop saleswise until issue #4, which had the Wood "Superduperman" story. From that time on Mad became a cult favorite. Even my future brother-in-law, who was in in high school in the early '50s, bought Mad, as did his buddies. Mad was real gone! It was hep! I didn't know any of that, though. I just knew that I recognized who Superman was, I knew who the Lone Ranger was, I knew the comic book character, Archie, and I loved the grotesque, funny artwork of Wally Wood, Bill Elder and Jack Davis. They took all of those familiar characters and turned them inside out and upside down. They turned them into jokes. From that book I went on to the other Mad paperbacks, like Mad Strikes Back, Inside Mad, and Utterly Mad. From the time I first held these books I was hooked, a junkie to the drug of Mad-ness.

Mom's problem with Mad was the effect the drawings had on her, which was the exact opposite of the effect they had on me. She claimed they "made her head spin." They did that to me, too, just in a good way.

Take "Starchie, "Bill Elder's version of Archie. The art is very close to the original. The people who produce the Archie comics like to tout their comics as being wholesome, but there was no doubt that the whole subtext of their comic books was some sort of triangular sexual thing going on between Archie, Betty and Veronica. The author and editor of Mad, Harvey Kurtzman, always went for the most obvious satirical elements of what he was lampooning, and that is the crux of this story, behind its more obvious elements of Starchie and gang as juvenile delinquents.

The Lone Ranger was a guy who traveled around with a Native American companion and wore a mask. As in this Mad version called "The Lone Stranger," he steered clear of womenfolk. One might ask why? And did he and Tonto share body heat around the campfire? Anyway, when I saw this Jack Davis panel of the Lone Stranger being chased by the ugly "girl," I laughed my guts out. Yes, the lady chasing the Lone Stranger is actually a man in drag.

I was a big fan of Mad in the 1950s, but the two entities, the Mad paperback books and the regular Mad, magazines being published every couple of months, were entirely different things. I wondered why, but didn't know why they were different until later when I found out about the two editors, first Kurtzman, then Al Feldstein, about the Comics Code, about the color comic book after 23 issues becoming a 25¢ black and white periodical. Much to my mom's displeasure, despite a lot of yelling, burning my magazine collection, and even her outright theft of mail-ordered copies of early Mad comic books, I didn't give up on Mad.

What happened to me with The Mad Reader, I'm sure happened with a lot of people in my generation: aspiring cartoonists, comedians, actors, whoever. Who knew that such brilliance could exist in parody and satire? Looking back on that book today I still see the sort of genius I saw many years ago the first time I pulled it off the paperback rack.


*The copy of The Mad Reader at the top of this page is not my original Mad Reader, which was destroyed by my mother at some point in the late 1950s. This is a copy of a first printing I picked up in California 20 years ago.

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