Completely Mad: A History of the Comic Book and Magazine

Rating:
Summary: Boy! This SHOULD have been better!
Review: COMPLETELY MAD is a fairly thorough, albeit superficial, treatment of the MAD phenomenon. A biased perspective leaves much unsaid. Too much a valentine to Gaines and company. I would have enjoyed more material from the MAD comic book. Much of the information about the "usual gang of idiots" is extremely sketchy, bland and/or uninteresting, meaning that Ms. Reidelbach did not go very far beyond MAD's offices for information; i.e., a superficial and pretty lousy job of research. There was so much opportunity here!

Rating:
Summary: Flawed....But What Are Your Options?
Review: Maria Reidelbach's COMPLETELY MAD is gorgeous to look at, an oversized visual panoply of color & b/w selections from all eras of the magazine's history. The first 300 covers are reproduced in sequential thumbnails, and there's a generous amount of space devoted not only to the early Kurtzman period, but to the entire EC line of comics from which MAD emerged in '52. Okay, so much for the praise. Where the book falters is in that portion of the text devoted to the Feldstein-and-beyond era (56-91). It's a little understandable; when the entire project is beholden to the cooperation of the magazine for access and permission to reproduce images, you'd expect the thing to read somewhat like a valentine/press release - in fact, give Reidelbach credit for managing to shoehorn in an occasionally neutral or even mildly discouraging word here and there. But what I've always found a bit strange is that EC, who pioneered the practice of bestowing credit and laurels to the individual contributing writers and artists during its comic-book era, abandoned it during MAD's mega-successful run as a magazine. When you consider how indelibly imprinted on the American psyche the work of 'the usual gang of idiots' is, we learn next to nothing about them beyond the skimpiest of bios. In fact, you'd learn more about the day-to-day workings of the magazine and its staff from other sources (the Russ Cochran hardcover reprints, Frank Jacobs' MAD WORLD OF WILLIAM M GAINES, and various interviews in publications like THE COMICS JOURNAL). You'd figure that a publication whose cultural importance often outshone its increasingly-stale satire would warrant a slightly more serious look as well, but reading COMPLETELY MAD one never registers how superior the first fifteen years of MAD was to the subsequent thirty or so. Even the often-admitted increasing distance Gaines felt to the newsstand product (he never quite recaptured his hands-on enthusiasm for the editorial side of publishing after the comic-book witch hunts, and MAD's rocketing popularity throughout the 60s and 70s only further alienated him) is completely side-stepped. While this book is lovely to look at and worth having, these types of minuses finally outweigh its eye-candy appeal. Further compounding the flaws is the fact that many of its important contributors, now in their 60s and 70s, have now passed on or are in declining health...it is hoped that someone out there will finally publish a book that focuses on Clarke, Woodbridge, Aragones, Drucker, Martin, Jaffee and the equally-unsung writers (Siegel, DeBartolo, Kogen, Reit, etc) in as many of their own words as possible, and devoid of the soft-shoulders p.r. that hobbles this effort. Jeez, even Al Feldstein is short-shrifted here!

Rating:
Summary: Flawed....But What Are Your Options?
Review: Maria Reidelbach's COMPLETELY MAD is gorgeous to look at, an oversized visual panoply of color & b/w selections from all eras of the magazine's history. The first 300 covers are reproduced in sequential thumbnails, and there's a generous amount of space devoted not only to the early Kurtzman period, but to the entire EC line of comics from which MAD emerged in '52. Okay, so much for the praise. Where the book falters is in that portion of the text devoted to the Feldstein-and-beyond era (56-91). It's a little understandable; when the entire project is beholden to the cooperation of the magazine for access and permission to reproduce images, you'd expect the thing to read somewhat like a valentine/press release - in fact, give Reidelbach credit for managing to shoehorn in an occasionally neutral or even mildly discouraging word here and there. But what I've always found a bit strange is that EC, who pioneered the practice of bestowing credit and laurels to the individual contributing writers and artists during its comic-book era, abandoned it during MAD's mega-successful run as a magazine. When you consider how indelibly imprinted on the American psyche the work of 'the usual gang of idiots' is, we learn next to nothing about them beyond the skimpiest of bios. In fact, you'd learn more about the day-to-day workings of the magazine and its staff from other sources (the Russ Cochran hardcover reprints, Frank Jacobs' MAD WORLD OF WILLIAM M GAINES, and various interviews in publications like THE COMICS JOURNAL). You'd figure that a publication whose cultural importance often outshone its increasingly-stale satire would warrant a slightly more serious look as well, but reading COMPLETELY MAD one never registers how superior the first fifteen years of MAD was to the subsequent thirty or so. Even the often-admitted increasing distance Gaines felt to the newsstand product (he never quite recaptured his hands-on enthusiasm for the editorial side of publishing after the comic-book witch hunts, and MAD's rocketing popularity throughout the 60s and 70s only further alienated him) is completely side-stepped. While this book is lovely to look at and worth having, these types of minuses finally outweigh its eye-candy appeal. Further compounding the flaws is the fact that many of its important contributors, now in their 60s and 70s, have now passed on or are in declining health...it is hoped that someone out there will finally publish a book that focuses on Clarke, Woodbridge, Aragones, Drucker, Martin, Jaffee and the equally-unsung writers (Siegel, DeBartolo, Kogen, Reit, etc) in as many of their own words as possible, and devoid of the soft-shoulders p.r. that hobbles this effort. Jeez, even Al Feldstein is short-shrifted here!

Rating:
Summary: For those who hated history textbooks -- This is like that.
Review: This book is a must-read for fans of the magazine or comic books in general. It has lots of samples from older issues, pictures of every cover, and a complete history of not only Mad, but the factors that influenced it, and the early days of comic books. The chapter on the history of Alfred E. Neuman is excellent.

Rating:
Summary: For those who hated history textbooks -- This is like that.
Review: This is a fairly good (though pandering) account of the history of Mad Magazine. At least the part that I read was. I didn't finish the book -- didn't even come close to finishing it -- because of one big problem: It reads like a textbook. It manages to make the subject of Mad Magazine boring. The account is written in such a dry manner that I just gave up on it and went back to reading my old MAD magazines. Forget all of the back-room dealings, squabbles, personnel changes, and business decisions. The only history I find I care about is the history of the art itself.