When Bill Gaines and his line of delightful horror comics
came under fire from the U.S. Senate Subcommittee on Juvenile Delinquency (yecch!), his cohort Harvey Kurtzman
schemed to pull one of their non-horror titles away from the Comic Code’s
wagging finger by changing the format of the satirical MAD from a comic book to a proper magazine. The move was cagey. It
was also a mad commercial and cultural success, and you know what happens when
something’s successful. Suddenly MAD
was sharing rack space with Zany!, Frantic!, Crazy, Man, Crazy, From Here
to Insanity, Loco, This Magazine Is Crazy, and plenty of
other would-be MADs. Like the comics
that attempted to recreate the macabre magic of Gaines’s horror titles, the MAD knock offs rarely lived up to the
mag they aspired to be. That doesn’t mean that they never delivered funny
material or top-notch art. In fact, many MAD-men
such as Jack Davis, Al Jaffee, Angelo Torres, Basil Wolverton, and Will Elder also
worked for the other guys. So did such comics luminaries as Jack Kirby, Joe
Kubert, and John Severin of the most enduring MAD knock off, Cracked.
IDW’s new collection Behaving
Madly curates articles from the best of the knock offs, many of which
feature these big name artists. Not everything in the collection can go
toe-to-toe with the Usual Gang of Idiots. Certain pieces seem to end before
reaching a punch line or opt for a sort of head-scratching absurdity. Some are
too text heavy, such as Ric Estrada’s limp spoofs of Hemingway and Spillane
from Frantic! The bits that strive
most to follow the MAD format are
usually the most successful, such as Art Gates’s hilariously violent Blackboard Jungle spoof from From Here to Insanity and Wolverton’s
magnificently grotesque “Fashions for the Miserable Motorist” from Crazy, Man, Crazy.
Whether or not the comedy hits the bull’s eye, the artwork
is almost uniformly boss and the ultra-fifties themes hit the nostalgic sweet
spot. Behaving Madly is a trip
through a malt shop populated by Elvis, Marilyn, Monsters (there’s an entire
section devoted to Drac, Frankie, and their cronies), Archie (in a Zany! parody that’s nearly identical to
one that appeared four years earlier in MAD),
Ernie Kovacs lookalikes, and Maiden Form bra models. This also means that the spoofs
sometimes play up such outdated and highly regrettable sources of “humor” as racial
stereotypes and beating up women (blecch!).
However, most of the pieces in Behaving
Madly are an uncomplicated kick, and the near 50-page introduction is a swell
history of these second, third, fourth, fifth and sixth-rate magazines.