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Mad Art: a visual celebration of the art of Mad
Magazine and the idiots who create it
by Mark Evanier
(Watson-Guptill, $24.95 (Cheap!), trade paperback, 304 pages; 2002.)
Mad Art is a snappy, attractive and somewhat misleading title
for this nicely constructed trade paperback compiled by the publishers
of Mad magazine, the seminal satire periodical that recently
celebrated its fiftieth birthday. Misleading because  the
book actually centres more around the "idiots" -- the artists who have
helped establish Mad's legacy of zany, multilevel humour -- than
it does the artwork itself. Over seventy thumbnail biographies
are featured, with examples of the artists' work selected primarily
for visual support.
However, the misleading title is not a bad thing. That's because there
is no management team I know of that has more creatively or abundantly
recycled its product over the years than the good folks at Mad
(except, maybe, for their counterparts at LucasFilms or PBS, or the
copyright holders of the songs of The Who). It has been with an eyeball
jaundiced over the years by "Haven't I seen this all before?" that I've
approached each compendium the Mad publishers have offered, including
this one. And, while I don't claim to be an authority on the catalogue
of over one hundred collections created from the upwards of 420 issues
of Mad magazine that have hit the newsstands since 1952, I would
doubt that much, if any, of the biographical data featured here has
ever been printed before; at least, not in a single collection such
as this. The artwork ... now that's a different story. But, as I said,
while the implied promise of an abundance of artwork may be the lure
of Mad Art, it's the bios that are its meat.
Sadly, the bios do become a bit tedious. Author Mark Evanier's profiles
cover the legends (Will Eisner, Wallace Wood) and include every lunchpail
guy (and a couple of garbage pail guys, too). And it is to Evanier's
credit that he is able to sustain interest in the bios quite deep into
the book when you consider how much in common it turns out these Mad
artists all have. Even so, their stories begin, after a while, to run
together like so much soupy tempera; it seems as though they all came
from either New York (Harvey Kurtzman, Dave Berg, Bob Clarke) or a Spanish-speaking
country (Antonio Prohias, Sergio Aragones, Angelo Torres). Some (George
Woodbridge, Peter Paul Porges) went to school with an art director for
the magazine or (Ray Alma) took a class from one. One (Irving Schild)
regularly had lunch with a regular contributor. Two were related to
celebrities (Drew Friedman, the son of playwright Bruce Jay Friedman,
and James Warhola, the nephew of Andy Warhol). A few studied classical
painters while in school. Quite a few studied comic book artists while
on the street. Most of the New Breed (or should that be "Brood"?) read
Mad as kids. And the vast majority were encouraged to submit
work by somebody who knew somebody else who worked at the magazine.
Come to think of it, the text is a 304-page manual on the "Mad Art"
of networking. (But only if you were male -- except for Amanda Connor
and Shary Flenniken, the artists profiled are all men, most having been
members of the de facto "He-man Woman-haters' Club" that existed
at Mad for more than forty years.)
Mad Art also serves as a reminder of how seamlessly the writing
and illustration come together to create gags for the magazine; yet
Evanier seems to staunchly avoid this truth in his text by separating
the artwork from the writing -- breaking down the components -- at every
turn. Only after perusing the selected illustrations ourselves do we
notice that almost none of them are drawn without words either inside
the frames or accompanying them. Even the rare wordless gags come from
scripts. Sure, Don Martin or Antonio Prohias drew speechless cartoons
(although, truth be told, the "glinks" and "splorps" Martin wrote into
his gags could be called "words" of a sort), but Mad has employed
very few writer/artists over the years.
And placing the artwork under the spotlight only serves to illustrate
(oh man, I kill me!) how much the writing increases its effectiveness.
The wonderful Return of the Jedi parody illustrated by master
caricaturist Mort Drucker and wisely included in the book will have
you straining to read the small print in the speech balloons written
by gifted satirist Dick DeBartolo. And, as well done as the great Jack
Rickard's movie caricatures were, they were drawn to match the speech
balloons composed by unsung writer Frank Jacobs. The humorous expressions
on the faces of Rickard's caricatures were made hysterical by the low-key
hilarity of Jacobs's scripts. Like the lyrics and melody of a classic
song, the greatness of the finished piece exceeds that of the individual
contributions of its creators.
Mad came from the era of unique niche magazines that also gave
us Playboy, Sports Illustrated and Famous Monsters
of Filmland. Each has been in slow demise for quite some time (indeed,
as I write this, Famous Monsters of Filmland is in stasis), and
their back issues are highly collectable today. Surpassed in irreverence
if not in quality by writing-based humour publications like National
Lampoon and The Onion, Mad's nostalgic-satire soufflé
of artwork and piece writing nonetheless keeps the publication off life
support. It may no longer be the "cool" magazine it once was back in
the 1950s and 1960s, but, as long as its publisher keeps on successfully
marketing these compendia, it will continue to survive, if not flourish.
And, like the misleading title of this latest collection, that's not
a bad thing.
Review by Randy M Dannenfelser.
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