Word: mads
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...Cage correct in considering a 1957 Ford pickup a work of art? Am I right in holding a 1953 Mad comic (#5, of course) in the same esteem? Or are we both merely venerating, financially and artistically, the tastes of our youths that we are too stubborn or eternally adolescent to outgrow...
...lent its most popular character, Popeye, to cartoons. So did George Herriman with his Krazy Kat and R. Crumb, to his immediate and lingering regret, with Fritz the Cat. (Winsor McCay, who created his Little Nemo in Slumberland comic strip in 1905, smartly made his own animated films.) Say "Mad," and most people will think of the magazine, or the TV show, not Harvey Kurtzman's inestimably more original and insurrectionist comic book, which existed for 23 glorious issues from...
...Dreaming up and writing Mad at EC Comics, Kurtzman virtually invented what would become the era's dominant tone of irreverent self-reference: one form of pop culture mocking all other forms, and itself. Kurtzman inspired several of the artists in this show, including Crumb, whose exemplarily twisted panels first appeared in Kurtzman's post-Mad magazine Help!, and Art Spiegelman, whose Pulitzer Prize-winning Maus in 1986 spurred a lot of high-minded people toward a belated appreciation of the form. (A comic book about the Holocaust - that must somehow be important...
...Many comics artists, including Kurtzman and much of the Mad gang, had been schooled in fine art before turning to the strips. Some, like Will Elder, Kurtzman's loopiest cartoonist, and Al Feldstein, the mastermind of EC's horror and science fiction comics before becoming editor of Mad in 1956, have turned to more respectable forms of watercolors - what could easily be recognized as art, if not great art - in their twilight years. But in their prime, when Elder and Feldstein (and Herriman and Segar and King) were doing their most vigorous work, sending out comic distress signals under...
...that raises my last quibble about the museuming of comics. Many of the artists included as writers more than "directors." Put it this way: would you rather see (read) Kurtzman's Mad or Spiegelman's Maus illustrated by other artists, or have others write stories for which Kurtzman and Spiegelman provided the drawings? The first, obviously, because the genius was in the writing. Indeed, though Kurtzman and Feldstein did their own drawing for some EC comic covers and stories, most were illustrated by terrific artists (Elder, Wallace Wood, Jack Davis) who brought their own personalities to the equation. At Marvel...