As I promised last week, I will use the tradition advertising post on Wednesday to show your some of the stuff Craig Yoe and I didn't include in Behaving Madly, the Mad Magazine Imitation book coming out from IDW one of these days. Craig and I will be signing the first copies at the IDW booth at the San Diego Comic Con on Friday from 1 to 2.
Going through all the magazines involved, it struck me taht some movies and some tv shows were parodied more often than others. In the book we included one parody of the Glen Ford movie Blackboard Jungle, a marvelous piece by Art Gates for Crazy, Man, Crazy. But there were also parodies of this movie in Snafu (by Russ Heath) and Mad itself. Of course we couldn't use the Mad parody (by Walace Wood) and the Russ Heath one was printed very badly in all of the samples we found. And fortunately we were able to include a lot more terrific stuff by Heath anyway.
Another tv phenomenon spoofed a lot was the $64.000. Before the fraud scandal broke, many people were suspicious of the program. And some pretty good artists were involved. Ross Andru did one for Lunatickle in the style of Kurtzman's Mad magazine parodies, Mike Sekowsky a more illustrative one for Cockeyed and even Art Gates got into the game with a short parody for Crazy, Man, Crazy. We ended up using none of them, because Andru's was a bit too long (so we included a funny image from one of his other long parodies), Mike Sekowsky's not funny enough (but we did include a large illustration from it) and Art Gates was already given his due.
This may seem unfortunate, but I think it worked out fine. The book represents the best of the genre and is already being reviewed positively for some of it's more unique surprises. If we would have filled the book with sample after sample it would have hurt the impact from the ones we do have. In the forty page introduction I have taken care to describe every title so you will know what's in what and if you want to go and buy some more, you will know what to choose. That way we have hopefully made a book that caters to the collectors and the unitiated in an equal way.
But enough with the apologies, here are the stories.