Here are seven more Bill Elder classics from the "older, darker" Mad.
Mole! (December 1952)
Shadow! (April/May 1953)
Shermlock Shomes! (October 1953)
Shermlock Shomes in The Hound of the Basketballs! (October 1954)
Restaurant! (October 1954)
Howdy Dooit! (December 1954)
Mickey Rodent! (January 1955)
4 comments:
It's weird because I was quite the student of MAD, but only much later. My interest peaked with the Star Wars parodies. The mood of these strips is familiar, and... not.
Ultimately I became disillusioned with MAD because of the pervasive second-person narrative that seemed to be going on about how much everything sucked.
That's interesting. I think we talked about that stuff before at some point.
From my point of view, as a young kid, Mad was perfect, even though on some level I knew I wasn't the target audience -- I was a little too young -- and therefore I wasn't quite getting all their political/countercultural "everything sucks" material. ("Pollution" etc.) However the occasional glimpses I got of the earlier Mad stuff ("Humor in a Jugular Vein" inserts in the Super Specials, stuff in the paperbacks etc.) always flat-out scared me.
When I got older I switched permanently to National Lampoon, which was my introduction to the world of the "straight" parody. At that point I was old enough to be into serious comics etc. and I was now fully appreciating the old-school Mad stuff. The problem is that it's so hard to come across, unless you've got one of the digital collections.
I love the Mickey Rodent bit. Like Octo I only became familiar with Mad after the Star Wars parodies came out. I don't ever recall Mad having full color, comic book stories like those you posted.
As I explained, Mad was only like this during a few years in the 1050s, before it changed.
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