MAD Strikes Back! – Harvey Kurtzman, 1955 ★★½

Taking a MAD Look Back

Last month came further evidence of the Apocalypse: MAD magazine rebooted itself. After a run of 550 issues begun in 1952, the humor staple officially rehauled itself with a new Issue #1. Readers of the latest ish were greeted by new staff, new logo, and new overall design.

However tempting to greet this all with a resounding Blecch!, MAD reboots are nothing new. In 1955, just three years into its existence, MAD underwent what remains its most radical transformation, from a comic book by and for a niche intelligentsia into a full-size humor magazine that would morph by the 1960s into a cultural and commercial juggernaut. Jokes got broader, grosser, less dense, more overt. In came Alfred E. Newman, “What Me Worry?”, veeblefetzer, fold-ins, Snappy Answers To Stupid Questions, Spy Vs. Spy, Don Martin, Sergio Aragones, and the rest of the Usual Cast Of Idiots.

Gone was, well, the stuff that makes for a long-gone comic-book legend beloved by some and forgotten by everyone else. Which leads me to the book I’m reviewing today, MAD Strikes Back.

Back in the 1970s, I was your typical pre-teen MAD magazine fan. I loved their movie and TV-series parodies, their gently pointed satirical tone, their goofy marginalia and house ads. I even enjoyed Dave Berg’s “The Lighter Side Of…” series, to be charitable an acquired taste.

But I had no idea who Harvey Kurtzman was, or a notion of MAD predating Alfred E. Then one day I got hold of a MAD Super-Special issue with a replica insert of a 1950s MAD comic book. The name itself was familiar enough; not so everything else, beginning with the legend that ran over the logo: Tales Calculated To Drive You MAD.

Introducing the MAD of Harvey Kurtzman.

Imagine a series of blackout horror stories, aiming for both chills and laughs, delivered in a surrealist style full of in-jokes and side jokes and a storyline that seems ready to derail in every panel. Imagine a cartoon version of “The Goon Show” where random chaos and existential dread claw at you from every frame. Imagine all of this done in an ostensibly kid-friendly style, with no profanity, nudity, or overtly risqué content, yet with an ever-present sense of the transgressive.

Kurtzman was MAD’s first editor-in-chief, one of only five in its history (less leadership turnover over that time than Cuba). He was also the main writer, sometimes the only one in a whole issue. Forget your Usual Gang of Idiots: Kurtzman was Boss Idiot and the whole Gang besides. Well, not including the illustrators, of which there were several key figures. MAD Strikes Back! features Kurtzman’s writing and art by his three best-known MAD artists: Wally Wood, Will Elder, and Jack Davis.

A self-portrait of Will Elder (on right) with his boss and writer-collaborator, Harvey Kurtzman. When Kurtzman left MAD magazine in 1956 in a dispute over pay, he took Elder with him. They ended up making cartoons of a decidedly more adult bent at Playboy magazine. Image from https://www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/2015/04/mad-man/391838/.

Key stories run as follows:

Prince Violent – Like most of the main features here, a takeoff on a long-running newspaper strip, in this case “Prince Valiant.” Prince Violent cleaves and slashes his way through Arthurian England in search of a beautiful woman whose hair he mistakes for a Viking’s beard.

Captain TVideo – Unusually for this time, a MAD send-up of a program from the then-fresh medium of television, “Captain Video.” Here cheap props vie with gimmick-huckster interruptions to threaten a flimsy plot about invaders from Venus.

Gopo Gossum – What happens when a newspaper strip becomes too clever and political for its own good? There’s trouble a-brewing at the Okeekeefoonie Swamp in this take-off on the legendary “Pogo.”

Ping Pong – A send-up of the 1933 movie classic King Kong, in which catching the fabled beast is the least of the trouble facing an intrepid, dogged, and utterly moronic team of adventurers.

Poopeye – In another takeoff of an enduring comic strip, Poopeye the Sailor and his beloved Mazola must try to keep baby Swee’back from crying, even when the source is a Tarzan- or Superman-like bully and precious, power-inducing spinach is in short supply.

Cartoon violence is a recurring target in MAD Strikes Back. Sample panel of "Poopeye" by Will Elder. Image from http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/ReferencedBy/Popeye. 

Teddy And The Pirates – Flat-hatting through deadly Asia, our titular hero and his companion Half-Shot Charlie encounter the beautiful Burma, the voluptuous Dragging Lady, and Connie, who disappointingly turns out to be a man. Will they ever get around to answering the big question: “How come they call you ‘Teddy And The Pirates’?”

Cowboy – A comparison of the Old West of movie legend with the real frontier of the 1860s reveals many discrepancies, like how one goes about the business of killing a guy when you deal in 19^th-century lead. Think Sergio Leone might have read this?

Manduck The Magician – Hypnotism has its uses, but also its limitations. Too bad our hero, a takeoff on “Mandrake The Magician,” is too busy getting high on his own supply to figure this out.

There are also shorter features sprinkled throughout the book, like a series of semi-legitimate puzzles and a send-up of Ripley’s Believe It Or Not that reveals such facts as “Renfrew Zets Fell From A 50 Story Window – And Lived!” being there was a fire escape beside it.

All of this, as explained in Grant Geissman’s Introduction to the 50^th Anniversary edition, is material originally published in MAD the comic book between 1953 and 1955. The only original material for the book is by radio and television comedians Bob & Ray, who supplied a foreword for MAD Strikes Back’s original publication where they remind readers to study the book’s Library of Congress Catalog Card Number:

“Often, when people learn we do this, they say, ‘Why bother with that, Bob and Ray?’

To which we answer, ‘Because it’s efficient. It avoids confusion.”

This breezy essay captures in a nutshell the essence of MAD’s later style as a magazine, humor built around a clear premise. In the comic-book form represented by everything else in this volume, the style is more discursive, loopy, and brazenly nonsensical, more so even then memorizing numbers so you can be more helpful to librarians.

Assigning a rating to a book like MAD Strikes Back is a challenge, the same way it is to rate episodes of Mystery Science Theater 3000 or Bootsy Collins albums. If you can plug into a left-field sensibility and are willing to ride a random-seeming stream-of-consciousness flow, there is a remarkable steadiness in the quality that leave you feeling much the same way, whether that be satisfied or puzzled.

That said, I don’t think MAD Strikes Back is a sparkling selection of material. There are a couple of duds here; other pieces feel flat on re-readings. But MAD Strikes Back showcases the partnership that made MAD a brilliant comic before it was, in my view anyway, an even better magazine: Kurtzman and Elder.

Elder is the artist behind the two best offerings here: “Ping Pong” and “Poopeye,” where side sight gags include Wimpy chasing a succession of critters with a pair of hamburger buns and a sign reading: “There’s some sailor in every port & some port in every sailor.” Elder also drew “Manduck,” less effective but still entertaining, with a killer ending.

Kurtzman’s legacy as an editor/writer at MAD is mixed: He had a very sharp point-of-view and wanted the pieces he worked on to flow just so, which irked several artists and led to many delays.

Elder’s art captures the virtue of Kurtzman’s controlling approach. He plays the offbeat storyline straightforwardly enough, working his magic on the margins. “Chicken fat,” he called it, and it made a tasty ingredient. Every panel offers its own wordplay or clever visual puns.

“Ping Pong” opens on a scene of a boat entirely shrouded by a “pea-soup fog.” A machete cuts a square. While one crewman takes a bite from it (“Just taste this fog! Delicious pea soup!”) the other sailors try to figure out where they are. Not only are they lost, they have sailed off the water entirely and are now cruising over land, where foliage consists of tree trunks topped by giant hands, being that they are palm trees.

Everything goes, and everybody follows, in this sample Will Elder panel from "Ping Pong." Image from http://barebonesez.blogspot.com/2017/08/ec-comics-its-entertaining-comic-issue.html.

They are soon greeted by friendly natives who swap them Brooklyn Dodger baseball cards for the woman on the ship, beautiful Lana Lynn. The natives plan to sacrifice her to their gorilla god, Ping Pong; the captain of the ship and a movie director just want cool footage to show back home. A series of increasingly absurd dinosaurs chase them across a jungle populated by skulls, sharks, and flower-delivery guys:

Try to get an INSIDE shot of that Justplainsaurus, Bo!

Ping Pong, like the original monster, falls hard for Lana, but she’s no Fay Wray when it comes to getting what she wants. By story’s end, Pong’s one whipped monkey. The expedition survivors make it back home to discover their big discovery is not as big as they thought.

The formula for these MAD stories is similar, and not unlike the horror comics by which its publisher, EC Comics, had built its business to this point. “Captain TVideo” is a good example of this, a straightforward send-up for the most part where actors pretend staplers are ray guns which playfully morphs into a genuine horror story by its end.

Reading the first couple of MAD issues published in 1952 reveals a definite Cryptkeeper vibe. “Humor In A Jugular Vein” was MAD’s motto then; this idea persists through much of MAD Strikes Back.

Sometimes a send-up is underinspired. This is the case with “Prince Violent,” the strident premise being that the era represented is excruciatingly savage beneath a veneer of romanticism. Wally Wood’s pictorial representation is a spot-on parody of Hal Foster’s precise draftsmanship in the original, but the story never gets off the ground as Prince V chases his maiden, only to discover the reason she was running away was something she could cure with a pair of scissors.

Something for kids, something for Dad: A sample panel of "Teddy And The Pirates," a take-off on "Terry And The Pirates" drawn by Wally Wood. Image from http://barebonesez.blogspot.com/2017/08/ec-comics-its-entertaining-comic-issue.html.

The “Pogo” parody, also drawn by Wood, was the toughest read for me. Wood’s art is a spot-on imitation of “Pogo” creator Walt Kelly, but the thin story devolves into name-checking a bevy of then-famous political figures before the whole story abruptly ends with an atomic explosion.

As with the other features, cartoon cameos abound here. By the end, mock Disney characters look on in horror, recalling how they warned Gopo and his gang to avoid politics: “It’s Darnold Duck’s fault! It’s a wonder anyone can understand him when he talks!”

Geissman’s 2002 introduction to the 50^th Anniversary Edition offers a pleasant, concise review of specific issues and publication dates which make up the content of the paperback, explaining what made Kurtzman’s MAD unique. Black-and-white reproductions of what were originally four-strip color illustrations and a cramped, sideways manner of presentation are decided drawbacks. I much prefer the original comic-book format; color or no it gives the zany art room to breathe.

The MAD paperback has become a cultural artifact in its own right; just try finding one in a tag sale or consignment shop. Being the second-ever such paperback, MAD Strikes Back is worth having even when the humor gets a bit dated. The later magazine would churn out articles more suited to the paperback treatment; many of the paperbacks that followed are cover-to-cover classics. But any chance to pick up and re-read “Poopeye” or “Ping Pong” presents an amusing journey of the mind worth taking – no matter how many more times MAD makes itself over.