The MAD Reader

1954, 1973 Ballantine edition
The MAD Reader
Original price 75 cents, purchase price 65 cents
Very worn paperback
B-

I grew up reading MAD Magazine, including reprints of issues from the 1950s and '60s.  But I will freely admit that the funniest thing in this collection is the "vital message from Roger Price."  The creator of "Droodles" (which we'll get to in the '60s, for reasons I'll explain then) and co-creator of Mad Libs (no relation to MAD Magazine) was one of the funniest post-WWII writers, and he contributed a bit to MAD in the mid-'50s.  (If I remember correctly, the hilarious satire of bull-fighting, about the "sport" of dog-kicking, was his.)

The rest of the writing here is mostly by the over-rated Harvey Kurtzman.  I've always maintained that MAD did a pmuj (reverse shark-jump) when he left and they got "The Usual Gang of Idiots."  The best thing about the comic book days is the artwork, but reproduced smaller and in black and white it definitely loses something, particularly the detailed illustrations by Bill Elder.  (I've got late '80s color reprints of the earliest comics, so we'll revisit this much later.)

Still, there's enough here to enjoy in this early "best of," including the satires Dragged Net! ("Dom Badomm Dom!"), Gasoline Valley! (funnier than ever since the characters are still aging six decades later, although "Alexander Bumpstead" no longer does), and of course Starchie (no exclamation point).  The last of these remains one of the best things ever in MAD, and I say that as someone who also grew up reading Archie comics.  Everything in this satire is "typical teen-age" something, they make fun of the jagged-line in phone conversations, there's gratuitous nudity (of "Wedgie"), gratuitous drug humor, and a not at all gratuitous question:  Why does Starchie prefer Salonica to Biddy?

At the time of these early MADs, comics were coming under fire, the "media that's corrupting our children" of that era (compare rap music or violent video games in the '90s).  It was mostly comic magazines that were targeted, although Walt Kelly faced some censorship in the newspapers.  E.C. (publisher Gaines's "Educational Comics") got into more trouble over its horror comics, but MAD was also controversial.  One of the better Jack-Davis-drawn stories is Newspapers!, pointing out the hypocrisy of grown-ups being horrified by comic books when there were equal outrages in their reading material.

The best of the Wally-Wood-illustrated stories is Flesh Garden!, which is not all that different from the title of the 1974 porno satire, Flesh Gordon.  (No, I've never seen it.)