Mad about Comic Strips [With Comic Strip]

This is worth buying for the first 2/3s of the book: older material from MAD that totally eviscerates the daily comic strips with great precision and affection. The parodies of Little Orphan Annie and Maggie and Jiggs (with truly disturbing work from Krigstein), Mandrake the Magician, Popeye, Katzenjammer Kids, Gasoline Alley, and others are priceless work from Wally Wood and Bill Elder and several others-- some of the best and funniest stuff that's ever been in MAD. But everything after the color section in the middle is almost completely expendable: newer material that mocks newer daily strips that don't merit the attention. I mean really: is it worth making fun of Garfield? BC? Beetle Bailey? The Family Circus? The older material works because the strips from the 20s to the 50s had identities forged over decades, with vast readerships. The newer strips are pale imitations of the old chestnuts, and the MAD parodies and one-panel gags are likewise lukewarm. So: buy this for the sterling stuff from MAD's first ten years, but skip the unworthy last 40 pages, a sad mockery of what's become the most disposible page of the newspaper....

I found this a wonderful selection of reprints from the magazine over the years and what really made it for me were the drawing styles, exactly like the newspaper originals, for instance there are several parodies of Johnny Hart's BC and they look so right. Eight strips from the first twenty-three issues of Mad are included but unfortunately not the famous Comic Book Sounds Effects (issue twenty, 1955) drawn by Wally Wood but what is included is a life-size reprint of a newspaper comic section, the 1959 'Sunday Comic Section we'd like to see', which includes a brilliant satire of Ripley's Believe It or Not! If you read the newspaper strips over the years you'll really enjoy this parody paperback, which is a neat production job, too.

It's really great to have the Mad comic pages all in one place. I like the way Mad takes a theme and creates a book out of it. Plus it lists the issue the article first appeared in!!!!! Keep 'em coming!!!!