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Seeing Mad: Essays on Mad Magazine’s Humor and Legacy ed. by Judith Yaross Lee and John Bird

2021; Comics Studies Society; Volume: 5; Issue: 3 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1353/ink.2021.0030

2473-5205

H. D. Hampton,

American Literature and Humor Studies

Reviewed by: Seeing Mad: Essays on Mad Magazine’s Humor and Legacy ed. by Judith Yaross Lee and John Bird Hayes Hampton (bio) Judith Yaross Lee and John Bird, editors. Seeing Mad: Essays on Mad Magazine’s Humor and Legacy. University of Missouri Press, 2020. xxiv + 596 pp, $65, $40. Judith Yaross Lee and John Bird’s Seeing Mad: Essays on Mad Magazine’s Humor and Legacy is an essential collection, the first scholarly book on Mad and one that, while it occasionally strays into fannish adulation, sets a high bar for future work. Seeing Mad offers twenty scholarly essays, interviews with editor Nick Meglin and artist-writer Al Jaffee, capsule biographies of fifty of Mad’s major contributors, dozens of reproduced pages and panels, and “A Mad Timeline: 1952–2020.” Lee’s thorough introduction traces Mad’s metamorphosis from an early 1950s comic about comics to Mad As We Know It, which coalesced in the early 1960s as a magazine with a broad satirical range, from media and advertising to politics and daily life. Her introduction provides an historical account of Mad that argues for its formative influence on American humor and culture, and this influence is variously explored and debated in many of the essays. Seeing Mad originated as an expanded 2014 issue of Studies in American Humor that “nearly doubled the existing scholarship on Mad,” according to Lee and Bird’s “Preface and Acknowledgments” (xix). The book includes “updates of the original articles” plus “newly commissioned essays” (xix) and is divided into sections covering “The Usual Gang,” “Features from Cover to Fold-In” (including a perceptive look at that feature, and Al Jaffee’s career, by Kerry Soper), “Themes” (Jewishness, for example, in an insightful essay by Nathan Abrams, as well as the Cold War and Mad’s obsession with Richard Nixon), “Theories,” and “Legacies.” The latter section includes two of Seeing Mad’s finest essays, Nicholas Sammond’s “Harvey Kurtzman and the Rise of Underground Comix (An Alternative-Universe Analysis)” and Brian Cremins’s “Quotations from the Future: Harvey Kurtzman’s ‘Superduperman!,’ Nostalgia, and Alan Moore’s Miracleman.” Early in the book, in his essay “Harvey Kurtzman and Modern American Satire” (Kurtzman is rightfully prominent in Seeing Mad), M. Thomas Inge asks a question that, in one form or other, hovers over the entire volume: “Would the shape and nature of American [End Page 345] humor and popular culture have been the same without the presence of Kurtzman” and therefore of Mad (68)? Inge seems pretty sure they would; he cites stand-up comics of the 1950s and 1960s, radio comedians like Fred Allen, and parodists like Stan Freberg and Sid Caesar as just a few of the figures who, independently of Mad, were “questioning and pushing the envelope of the standards of conformity” (69). However, Kathleen Mol-lick argues that when Mad changed to the magazine format in 1955, in the wake of the national moral panic about comics, the publication came into its own as a potent cultural force. Mollick’s “Genre Studies and Mad Magazine: Changing and Challenging Genres, 1953–1966” discusses “how expanding beyond cartoon parody freed the magazine to engage in wider political and social commentary” (424). For example, while Kurtzman and Wood’s Batman parody “Bat-Boy and Rubin!” (1953) “lightly” (422) alludes to contemporary anxieties about juvenile delinquency, Mollick argues that Lou Silverstone and Mort Drucker’s “Bats-Man” (1966) encapsulates “the generational conflict of the 1960s” (426). Of course, Mad had ventured into political and social commentary far earlier than 1966; James J. Kimble, in “Mutually Assured Disparagement: Enmification and Enlightenment in Early 1950s Mad,” discusses Kurtzman-era send-ups of Joseph McCarthy and examines the Cold War tropes and anxieties underpinning stories from “Outer Sanctum!” to, more overtly, “G. I. Shmoe!” and “Smilin’ Melvin!,” showing that, almost from the beginning, Mad “established a healthy social critique . . . at a time when public dissent was generally out of bounds” (341). Sammond, as well, considers the two McCarthy portrayals, but sees them as less subversive: “Neither . . . opts for a coherent political or ideological critique of either the Red Scare or its liberal opposition” (444). Instead, Mad’s objection to McCarthy...