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Mad Original Idiots Wally Wood, Jack Davis and Will Elder Review
Mad For It
♦Tripwire’s Senior Editor Andrew Colman reviews three volumes of DC’s EC classic collections focusing on Wally Wood, Jack Davis and Will Elder…
Mad Original Idiots
DC Comics
The first twenty-three issues of Mad were the bridge between its forebears such as Olsen and Johnson and the Marx Brothers, and Monty Python, underground comics, and a host of imitators. This celebrated material – ersatz, hyper, screwball and weird, underpinned by a very Jewish New York sensibility, has been reprinted countless times in many formats, and indeed is the humour comic title that refuses to fade away. My first exposure to these wonderfully bizarre stories would’ve been in the black and white pocket paperbacks issued by Ballantine in the 1970s – The Mad Reader, Mad Strikes Back, Inside Mad, Utterly Mad and The Brothers Mad, a genuinely loopy counterpoint to the more sophisticated political satire that inhabited the pages of what, with issue 24, became Mad Magazine.
Despite any misgivings, these three trade paperbacks, featuring the complete works of Wally Wood, Jack Davis and Will Elder in Mad comic, are a cheap and excellent entrée into this key title – garishly coloured, the reproductions within are certainly pleasing to the eye. By formatting each volume by artist, one can easily spot the individuals at work, despite their mandate to adjust to the house style delineated by the series’ originator, Harvey Kurtzman (who surely deserves a volume himself).
Wally Wood’s work, especially in such classic comic and movie send-ups as The Wild One (Wild ½), Superduperman, Flesh Garden and Prince Violent excels despite his classicist leanings as a fantasy illustrator – his versatility shines through here, despite his best E.C. work being in Weird Science and Weird Fantasy. If anything, the mercurial Kurtzman spirit that percolates throughout does mean that the artwork is too busy and uneven in places.
Jack Davis, perhaps stylistically more at home in the pages of Vault Of Horror or Crime Suspenstories, also became highly adept at the manic weirdness required of Mad artists – his horror style, which was formal and realistic, was initially used on stories that had elements of that genre (Hoo Hah!, Hex) but before long he loosened up with such brilliant features as Kane Keen and Hah! Noon. For the most part, Davis, who much preferred working on Mad than E.C.’s other books, was given oddball assignments from Kurtzman, including game show spoofs, literary adaptations (Alice In Wonderland) and media satire that would prefigure what was to come in the magazine. His unquestionable highlight for me is his parody of the Daily News (The Daily Poop) – quite simply a hysterical shredding of exploitation rags that, despite being 60 years old, is incredibly prescient and contemporary.
Will Elder’s volume, noticeably a little thicker than the other two, is perhaps the pick of the bunch, if only because his art, detailed and cartoonish as it was, was more suited to the title (Elder worked with Kurtzman long after the latter parted company with Bill Gaines, finishing his pencils on titles such as Goodman Beaver). Elder’s wilful insanity was on show from the beginning, with Ganefs! (“Yeah boss”) and Mole! two superbly off-kilter tales featuring unique characters. Everything with Goodman was hyper and crammed with jokes in the margins, his movie spoofs such as Ping Pong and Shermlock Shomes veering towards absurdity rather than parody. His key efforts would be his Archie send-up (Starchie), Mickey Rodent (his most controlled work, and perhaps the best Disney satire) and the rather sinister Howdy Dooit. And then there’s the quite barking puzzle pages and comic ads, which must’ve been brought to the attention of Cleese and co. at some point. There’s no shortage of brilliance in these three trades, and for a small investment you too can enter the barmy tour de force that was the original Mad comic. At the very least you can learn where so much later humour originated – accept no substitutes.
ANDREW COLMAN
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