Number 2402: Humbug and Mad: variations on a theme

I was 10 years old in 1957, and aware of the buzz on the movie, Baby Doll, from a play by Tennessee Williams. I thought the images of actress Carroll Baker sucking her thumb were odd, but not only was I only 10, I was completely naïve about sex and sexual symbolism. Baby Doll was controversial because of its sexual theme. But all of it went over my head.

That summer I bought Humbug #1 at a local pharmacy. Later in the summer I bought Mad #35. Both of them took off on the image of Carroll Baker. Humbug did a more traditional satire, probably written by editor Harvey Kurtzman, and Mad did a 4-page mash-up of Williams’s plays, Baby Doll, A Streetcar Named Desire, and The Rose Tattoo, drawn by Wallace Wood. Despite my innocence, I “got” the Humbug satire, but was puzzled by Mad. That was because at the time I knew more about Tennessee Ernie Ford* than Tennessee Williams.

When looking at Humbug and its bad printing, it did not match Mad, but I recognized the names Harvey Kurtzman and Jack Davis from the Mad Reader paperback. (And Humbug cost 10¢ less than Mad; important for a kid with a small allowance.) I knew more about Mad than I did sex. Not impossible, because I knew nothing about sex except I liked looking at pictures of actresses like Carroll Baker, Marilyn Monroe, and especially the incredible Brigitte Bardot . . . sigh. Oops, I’m going off into a reverie. Sorry about that.

The Humbug scans come from my copy of Humbug #1, and the Mad scans come from the CD set, Totally Mad.

*From YouTube, Tennessee Ernie’s biggest hit, “16 Tons”.

Number 1992: Nostalgic nostalgia: “Hah! Noon!”

This is the last posting of 2016.

One of the many celebrity deaths we had this past year was Jack Davis, a cartoonist I will always revere. By 1959, when I saw the satire, “Hah! Noon!” in the paperback, The Bedside Mad, Davis’s work already had a magical quality to me, and while I could not always collect everything he did I was always looking for his work.

“Hah! Noon!” is originally from Mad #9 (1954), and is a satire of the classic movie, High Noon (1952), with Gary Cooper and Grace Kelly. I don’t think I actually saw the movie until sometime in the sixties, but I already knew and loved the story based on the Kurtzman/Davis version. That is an ass-backwards way of viewing satire, but that was the way it was with me and Mad paperbacks in the '50s and early '60s.

This is a reprint from The Nostalgic Mad #3, from Mad Super Special #12 (1973). As for the inexorable passage of time, the clock strikes midnight on Saturday night, so goodbye and good riddance to 2016: “I’m a-leavin’!”

Number 1926: EC and OCD for me, see?

During my major collecting days it was not enough for me to have original EC Comics, I had to have all the reprints, also. That included the series of annual Mad Specials published in the 1970s which included bound-in copies of The Nostalgic Mad, reprinting the best of the comic book Mad by Harvey Kurtzman and artists Wood, Elder, and Davis. Not only did I have to have the Specials, I would buy copies of The Nostalgic Mad if I found them in bargain bins. (Separating them from the larger Mad Special in which they came often caused damage, making them relatively valueless as collectibles.)

My obsessive-compulsive collecting is mostly over. I say “mostly” because I just found a copy of Nostalgic Mad #3 (1974) in a bargain bin for a dollar, and my old OCD came right back. I just had to have it. The collecting compulsion can still strike at any moment.  At this stage in my life at least I know what compels me.

I especially liked this issue because it has one of my favorite Kurtzman Mad covers, pictured above, illustrating “Frank N. Stein!” illustrated by Will Elder. Scans of the story are from the reprint itself, the cover I swiped from Heritage rather than dig my copy of Mad Special #15 from its place in my (shudder) basement. My basement storage is my Frankenstein monster, built over the years from my collecting OCD, and like Frankenstein’s monster, will undoubtedly be my eventual undoing.