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The Sincerest Form of Parody: The Best 1950s Mad Inspired Satirical Comics
Paperback
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Publisher: Fantagraphics Underground - Fu Press
Published: Apr 29 2025
Pages: 208
Weight: 1.50
Height: 0.60 Width: 7.80 Depth: 10.90
Language: English
These earnest copiers of Mad realized that Will Elder's cluttered chicken fat art was a good part of Mad's success, and these pages are densely packed with all sorts of outlandish and bizarre gags that make for hours of amusing reading. The parody comics are uniquely '50s, catching the popular culture zeitgeist through a dual lens: not only reflecting fifties culture through parody but also being themselves typical examples of that culture (in a way that Harvey Kurtzman's Mad was not).
This unprecedented volume collects over 30 of the best of these crazy, undisciplined stories, all reprinted from the original comics in full color. Editor John Benson (who wrote the annotations for the first complete Mad reprints, and interviewed Mad editor Harvey Kurtzman in depth several times over the years) also provides expert, profusely illustrated commentary and background, including comparisons of how different companies parodied the same subject. Artists represented include Jack Davis, Will Elder, Norman Maurer, Carl Hubbell, William Overgard, Jack Kirby, Dick Ayers, Bill Everett, Al Hartley, Ross Andru and Mike Esposito, Hy Fleischman, Jay Disbrow, Howard Nostrand, and Bob Powell.
Casual comics readers are probably familiar with the later satirical magazines that continued to be published in the '60s and '70s, such as Cracked and Sick, but the comics collected in this volume were imitations of the Mad comic book, not the magazine, and virtually unknown among all but the most die-hard collectors.
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