Fans of the art of MAD shouldn't miss the first comprehensive museum exhibition of MAD art, on display from June 8 through October 27 at the Norman Rockwell Museum. Anyone who is not a fan of MAD art should see the exhibit to learn why they're mistaken.
Room after room is densely packed with beautiful originals from the classic years of MAD.
Collectors of MAD art joined with MAD artists and writers to assemble many of the greatest hits, providing a rare opportunity to see decades of quality art as it should be seen. Harvey Kurtzman, Jack Davis, Will Elder, Wally Wood, Paul Coker Jr., Don Martin, Frank Frazetta, Mort Drucker, Sergio Aragones up through Herman Mejia, Drew Friedman, Chris Payne, Sam Viviano, Tom Richmond and Richard Williams... they're all here, displayed in an excellent, thoughtful exhibition which gives these talents the recognition they're due.
 |
| MAD and all related elements TM and copyright EC Publications. Courtesy of DC. All rights reserved. Used with permission. |
 |
| Yes, that's a page from the classic Superduperman in the upper left corner. MAD and all related elements TM and copyright EC Publications. Courtesy of DC. All rights reserved. Used with permission. |
 |
| One of my favorite Wally Wood stories. MAD and all related elements TM and copyright EC Publications. Courtesy of DC. All rights reserved. Used with permission. |
 |
| An entire room full of Mort Drucker originals! |
 |
| Comparing the two paintings side by side is an education. MAD and all related elements TM and copyright EC Publications. Courtesy of DC. All rights reserved. Used with permission. |
Years ago, the dedicated followers of MAD grew up to become corporate CEOs, civic leaders, internationally renowned directors, hedge fund billionaires, great scientists, doctors and lawyers. Wherever life took them, no matter how respectable they became, they still carried the germ of MAD within them. Today those fans walk the most prestigious halls of power while MAD itself remained behind, a childhood artifact, printed on crummy paper and sold "cheap" at the corner newsstand. It's long overdue for MAD to catch up.
____________________________________
Full disclosure: I served as an advisor on this exhibit, which was co-curated by Stephanie Plunkett and Steve Brodner.
27 comments:
The Rockwell parody (?) is always amazing.
That Frazetta, in turn....
I've been waiting for something like this! The exhibit looks awesome.
Can't wait to go see this. Looks like one for the ages.
For better or worse, I'm old enough to have grown up with MAD comics and the early magazine issues.
Before me is the comic book MAD #23 (May 1955 - 10 cents), though I had read earlier ones first-hand. It includes the announcement that this was the last issue (sob!!). But coming next-up "We've expanded MAD into a regular big 25c magazine with pictures, printed lettering, covers, and everything, gang." Also before me is a copy of the first magazine: July 1955, but labeled No. 24 -- continuing the comic book sequence. Among other things, it contains "Is A Trip to the Moon Possible?" which includes the spaceship image you show.
The comic book MAD usually satirized other comic books as well as newspaper comic strips (though issue 23 only takes on the Walt Kelly "Pogo" strip). That kept the satire closer to what was being satirized than what became grist for the magazine. Okay, other magazine stuff could be satirized, but I've always felt that MAD comics was more pure, as in "Superduperman" that you cite.
"That kept the satire closer to what was being satirized than what became grist for the magazine. Okay, other magazine stuff could be satirized, but I've always felt that MAD comics was more pure, as in "Superduperman" that you cite."
Superduperman and Batboy & Rubin were Wood's masterpieces of the early Mad.
I recently bought Mad #12, and its cover is a weird harbinger of broader interests to come. The cover is well-designed I suppose, but it's all text, no fun compared to the first 11 covers, and I'm not even sure what it is supposed to satirize. The Saturday Evening Post? With no illustration? Some police gazette? I have no idea. Kids of the day were probably a bit baffled and disappointed. Maybe adults got it?
The mock magazine cover idea of #12 which continues with #16 and #19 then leads to the one great iteration of the idea; the composition notebook cover of #20 - which is a classic of public mischief up there with Orson Welles's War of the Worlds broadcast and Soupy Sales telling his young boy demo to send in to him all those funny green pieces of paper in daddy's wallet.
But the comic was already moving toward being (in its forward-facing newsstand presence) intellectual and subversive... without actually being any fun as a piece of comic entertainment.
It took, in my view, until issue #30 to get back on track with great, fun, and well-illustrated covers.
Wood's Mad Magazine work is magnificent. The Mad Comics stuff is charming but much of it looks overworked and cramped for my grown-up taste. Doing B/W humor work with Craftint or wash was really when he was at his best. Ultra-high technical precision with weirdness, lots of atmosphere and a sense of his contemporary world (salesmen, 1950s cars, ad agency scum, Hi-Fi nerds, strange children...). All individualized and not drawn using cliché conventions as so much of his mainstream work partly was. And the angular ballons and severe layout help his art. There's even a sense of fun that comes across. It's a pity he couldn't (or wouldn't) do more of this.
An ur-text of American postmodernity. Brilliantly subversive.
- - -
Postmodern Anonymouse.
Excellent! I'll be there. This show should've happened before MAD went out of business.
JSL
"An ur-text of..."
Aw, hell....
Bill
xopxe-- Agreed. Richard Williams was one of the best from the later team of artists at MAD. It's not easy to have your work displayed a few inches from an iconic Rockwell and still hold up well. Williams was there at the grand opening of the exhibition on June 8, along with many other artists who reconvened for the show. A great guy.
MORAN-- Yes, I think a lot of people have been itching to see these originals all pulled together in one place.
Donald Pittenger-- Sam Viviano was there at the opening, explaining his theory that everyone has strong views about MAD's peak period, but they always think that the peak was when they were a kid reading MAD. If you were a kid in the 1950s, you thought that was the high water mark. If you were a kid in the 1980s, you were certain that period was the best.
Kev Ferrara-- No dispute about Superduperman or Batboy and Rubin. The MAD team at the opening was saying that MAD as a comic book was a money loser until Superduperman, which changed everything. It knocked the ball out of the park, and word of mouth transformed MAD's future. That story led directly to other classic Wood parodies of comics, such as Little Orphan Melvin. But there was still a lot of wonderful material in that period between issue 12 and 30. I thought Wood's "Sound Effects" from that issue #20 was both fun and genre-expanding.
Anonymous wrote: "much of it looks overworked and cramped for my grown-up taste." For sure, and yet when I look at stories like that Supermarket story I photographed from the exhibition, that impossible clutter gives such a feeling of abundance and richness. You get the feeling that all those details would reward 4 or 5 readings. It also gives you the feeling that the artists weren't just in it for the buck. They could've done much less if they weren't having fun.
Anonymous / Postmodern Anonymouse-- Yes, it's amazing how effective you can be when you package your subversion in humor with beautiful pictures. If the founders of MAD had been on a picket line yapping about consumerism and conformity, no one would remember them today.
While I have since become a lover and collector of the earlier years of MAD magazine and comics, the first story that really blew my mind was the Hermann Mejia parody for Fellowship of the Ring. His use of watercolor really makes his work stand out from the other movie parody greats in the usual gang. I'm glad to hear that his work will be at the show!
Point well taken regarding details. Wally Wood was especially good at those. As best I can recall from circa-1954, I got as much or more enjoyment from details as I did from the narrative satire.
"The mock magazine cover idea of #12 which continues with #16 and #19 then leads to the one great iteration of the idea; the composition notebook cover of #20 - which is a classic of public mischief"
Errata: Wolverton's "Life Magazine" cover for Mad #11 is also a magazine parody, and classic as well as the first (?) of its kind. (Must have looked wild on the newsstand.)
"I thought Wood's "Sound Effects" from that issue #20 was both fun and genre-expanding.".
Absolutely. Not only one of the most fun, and most classic of the early Mad stories, but I think as important in its own way as Krigstein's Master Race or Eisner's noir Spirit sections in showing just how far the comic book/sequential vocabulary could be stretched.
"An ur-text of American postmodernity. Brilliantly subversive."
Postmodernism is subversion without talent or beauty. Mad Magazine believed in excellence.
"Sam Viviano was there at the opening, explaining his theory that everyone has strong views about MAD's peak period, but they always think that the peak was when they were a kid reading MAD."
The same thing is always said about Saturday Night Live and one's High School years. The thesis presumes there is no such thing as a connoisseur.
Postmodernism is subversion without talent or beauty. Mad Magazine believed in excellence.
Again conflating descriptive and prescriptive modalities. Mad Magazine isn't a foundational piece of American postmodernity because of editorial or artistic intent. It's postmodern because it, like the works of Thomas Pynchon, for instance, checks all the boxes for clear identification as thus. Doesn't mean it's not excellent, just that the totality of its excellence is particularly of its time.
...Family Guy, on the other hand, is just that - intentionally postmodern, and eminently "without any of parody's ulterior motives, amputated of the satiric impulse, devoid of laughter".
---
POstmodern Anonymouse
<<<<It's postmodern because it, like the works of Thomas Pynchon, for instance, checks all the boxes for clear identification as thus.
Didn't realize there were checkboxes for identifying postmodernism. Can you share the list?
~ FV
~FV
They can be condensed to one - "every achievement and insight of the past intimidates us, therefore we declare them redundant through the illogic of constructivism/deconstructivism/other nonsense which tries to unmake and dissolve them (can you help us out with this, Grievance Studies ?). Then we pile up the debris and try to climb on top to appear tall. We are infants knotted up in syllables."
But who gives a darn; they're laughing stocks. Leave them to it.
Drawings are far more interesting.
Bill
"every achievement and insight of the past intimidates us, therefore we declare them redundant through the illogic of constructivism/deconstructivism/other nonsense which tries to unmake and dissolve them"
The tactic is not to declare something "redundant" in order to dismiss it at one's whim.
It's declaring some thing or idea to be wholly believed or elevated based on the arbitrary exercise of illegitimate power. As with any given metanarrative of, say, qualitative hierarchies that "the credulous" accept uncritically. But which, when decrypted and analyzed by Superior Initiates are shown to have no validity.
And then... once that kangaroo court academic project is completed, whatever "X" had been targeted is then dismissable at one's whim; unmade, dissolved, defanged, put in its place, subjugated, etc... as some tyrannical phantasm.
The tautology in all this is that the first assertion of Postmodernism is that text/language is the "fundamental phenomena of existence." And if you believe that, all is solipsism anyway. You can't prove anything related to the outside world from within a closed symbol system. Thus nothing is provable, and gibberish is just as valuable as truth. And we're off to the Mad Hatter's Tea Party; a Sophist's paradise.
Point being, in order to root out how fake the postmodern arguments are - how incoherent, self-contradictory, and selective - you first need to nail them down. Otherwise you make one small error and this allows the initiate to continue to feel superior to you, which is their main goal in life.
I don't doubt it, Kev. The little priesthood can feel as superior as they please. They started off with 'all meaning is merely a construction', applied to everything except that premise, the sole thing it was true of. Everything after that is excreta and none of it makes sense even on its own terms. For myself at least not worth the trouble of delving into.
Let it dissolve in its own garble. Most of 'em are at the level of the lonely nut on the subway at this stage, shouting/singing for negative attention.
Bill
This is akin to denying the Nazism of Leni Riefenstahl simply on the basis of her artistic capabilities and impact on cinema. Childish. Postmodernity is the water you were born in.
And no book by any French nerd opened with "In the beginning was the Word". You're conflating philosophy and religion, reason and faith , Derrida and God,
again.
---
Postmodern Anonymouse.
What that sounds like outside your head - https://vidmax.com/video/97511-Nutcase-Playing-a-Guitar-On-The-Subway
"This is akin to denying the Nazism of Leni Riefenstahl simply on the basis of her artistic capabilities and impact on cinema. Childish. Postmodernity is the water you were born in."
Some self-obsessed college cult gets together and decides to call our time "Postmodernity" and I'm supposed to go along with it?
How about no. I'll let posterity decide what the nature of our era is. (Same with the crew now touting "MetaModernism!" as the next big thing!)
Comedy, satire, parody, razzing, caricature, heckling, self-referentialism, antiestablishmentarianism, and iconoclasm have been around since forever. The only thing new to postmodernism is the rhetoric (and prescriptions) of anti-unity, anti-art, anti-meaning, and anti-creator.
DIA is the ur-text of postmodernism as creative work. Not Mad Magazine.
DIA has rooms full of wood, sand, broken glass, and flourescent light bulbs left exactly where the workmen left them when they brought them into the museum. No better illustration of postmodernism aesthetics and cultural nihilism exists. (Except insofar as nihilistic and revolutionary postmodern rhetoric is used to justify actual vandalism.)
"And no book by any French nerd opened with "In the beginning was the Word". You're conflating philosophy and religion, reason and faith , Derrida and God,"
Not only are there dozens of excellent philosophy sites that discuss the epistemology and ontology of postmodernism in these terms, but people on these boards have also done so. By "first assertion" I meant the primary bedrock of the philosophy, not the literal opening of some early Derrida or Foucault book.
Your literalism is telling. Are you on the spectrum?
French nerd: The Gulf War did not take place.
American nerd: I'll see your observation on postmodernity and raise you
postmodernity did not take place!
---
Postmodern Anonymouse
It's not real. Like 'gender identity'. It only exists in the minds of its adherents.
Your comment made no sense and wasn't clever.
Did it ever occur to you that you think you live in “Postmodernity” because you live in the banal, derivative, hyper-mediated, nihilistic world that it describes? And you aren’t imaginative enough to postulate that others might be living different lives from your own, more enriched, loving, fun, direct, and creative?
Have you ever tried to makes something beautiful in your entire life? Have you ever tried to bring joy into the world?
Did it ever occur to you that you think you live in a Capitalist society because you live in the banal, derivative, hyper-mediated, nihilistic world that it describes? And you aren’t imaginative enough to postulate that others might be living different lives from your own, more enriched, loving, fun, direct, and creative?
The fact that I use an iPhone doesn't mean I can't be critical of Hayek. The fact that you participate in the simulated reality of the internet doesn't mean you can't be critical of Baudrillard.
Comedy, satire, parody, razzing, caricature, heckling, self-referentialism, antiestablishmentarianism, and iconoclasm have been around since forever. The only thing new to Renaissance humanism is the rhetoric (and prescriptions) of anti-unity, anti-art, anti-meaning, and anti-creator.
Gargantua and Pantagruel was a product of its time, and so was Mad Magazine. This really shouldn't be so difficult to grasp.
---
Postmodern Anonymouse
No, your banal "points" are not difficult to grasp.
Your tautologies and other fun-house argument forms (including your ludicrous word substitutions inside my quotes) on the other hand...
deserve a goodbye.
Post a Comment