There's been much chatter, at least in my e-mailbox, about the status and fate of MAD Magazine. There's also been discussion over on the weblog of Mike Snider, one of that publication's wittier contributors.
I call to your attention this posting in which Mike graphs and discusses its circulation slide. Notice the descent did not begin with the popularity of the Internet. It probably has more to do with a general and growing disinterest in this country in the basic concept of buying magazines of any kind.
I also call to your attention this posting in which Mike responds to the news that MAD will be trimmed back to quarterly status. I think he's wrong, by the way, that it will soon cease publication completely. My feeling is its overlords will always keep some publication on the newsstands called MAD, even if it doesn't bear a great resemblance to the MAD we know and love.
And I especially call your attention, assuming you have any left, to this posting which is about Frank Jacobs, who I still think is the funniest poet and lyricist of our day.
Meanwhile, MAD artist Tom Richmond is reporting over on his site about recent reports of financial woes within Time-Warner that are probably not unrelated to what's going on with the magazine. As he also notes, some MAD fans have been fantasizing that some wealthy guy will swoop in, purchase MAD from Time-Warner and keep the publication going in the grand tradition. I'd say there's about a 0% chance of the corporation ever selling off so famous a brand name for any amount of money. Conceivably, they might allow an outsider to license the right to publish the magazine called MAD so they don't have to...but that would suppose there's someone out there who loves the thing enough to lose millions of dollars a year just to see it continue. Maybe they can apply for a federal bailout...
Today marks fifteen years since the great comic book creator Jack Kirby passed away, a recognition that saddens me for all the obvious reasons. One, perhaps not so obvious, is that if he was still with us, he'd be even more famous and honored and rewarded than he was in his lifetime. It's only in the last decade or so that the works of folks like Jack and Stan Lee and Steve Ditko have been recognized as important (and lucrative) contributions to mainstream popular culture. Lee, I'm happy to see, is being showered with tributes and deals. Ditko is still with us but for his own reasons, chooses to avoid most of that. Kirby would have reveled in it.
I have written so much about Jack over the years that I'd be repeating myself to discuss his influence on so many of us. So I thought I'd just share the above photo with you. It was taken in Jack's studio in 1970 by my then-partner Steve Sherman...and yes, that's me in the Red Skull mask. There is or was (I think they're still in business) a company called Don Post Studios founded by a gent named, oddly enough, Don Post. If you ever need a great-looking rubber mask of a monster or other odd creature, look for the Don Post label.
Anyway, we took one of Mr. Post's plain, vanilla skull masks and a can of red spray paint and — voila! — we had a mask of Captain America's arch-enemy. Jack loved it and acted like we'd somehow figured out how to invent nuclear fission or something. It always felt good to get Jack's approval and an awful lot of people are still trying for it, one way or another...
Here's a bit of TV history...the episode of Hollywood Palace that aired April 17, 1965. It was hosted by Groucho Marx and the guest list included Gordon and Sheila MacRae, Shecky Greene, Miriam Makeba, Groucho's daughter Melinda, a flamenco dancer and a few other acts. The number Groucho performs with his daughter is charming but the real treat comes late in the proceedings — a sketch he does with the dowager of dowagers, Margaret Dumont.
Though her association with the Brothers Marx made her rather famous, Ms. Dumont did not work a lot. The last decade of her life, she averaged about one acting job a year. In February of '65, she taped the routine with Groucho — a re-creation of material from Animal Crackers...then a few days later, more than a month before the show aired, she died of a heart attack at the age of 83.
The entire hour-long program is embedded below in five parts which should play one after the other if you want to watch it from the top. But if you only want to see the reunion of Marx and Dumont, it starts at the beginning of Part Five so just zip ahead to that. Isn't it nice that she got to do this before she left us? And am I imagining it or are she and Groucho both really happy to be together again?
If no one's e-mailed this to you, wait. You'll have twenty copies in your mailbox by morning. The premise is that after Ben & Jerry's concocted an ice cream flavor in honor of Barack Obama — it was called Yes, Pecan — they (or someone) wanted to come up with a flavor to honor George W. Bush. Here, from an e-mail I received from Dawna Kaufmann, are some of the suggestions...
Grape Depression
Abu Grape
Cluster Fudge
Nut'n Accomplished
Iraqi Road
Chock 'n Awe
WireTapioca
Impeach Cobbler
Guantanmallow
Impeachmint
Melon Head
Good Riddance, You Lousy Motherf*cker
Heck of a Job, Brownie
Neocon Politan
Rocky Road to Fascism
The Reese's-cession
Cookie D'oh
The Housing Crunch
Nougalar Proliferation
Death by Chocolate
Death by Torture
Credit Crunch
Country Pumpkin
Chunky Monkey in Chief
George Bush Doesn't Care about Dark Chocolate
WMDelicious
Chocolate Chimp
Bloody Sundae
Caramel Preemptive Stripe
Pretzel Choker
I Broke the Law and Am Responsible For the Deaths of Thousands...With Nuts
Over on this weblog, they're pondering what is to them a mystery: Who colored the early issues of Fantastic Four? Those comics had credits for the writer, artists and letterer but the person who applied the often-inspired hues was always unidentified and unheralded. Indeed, it was not until the mid-seventies that any comics credited the colorists...and actually, there was a reason for this, though not a good one.
Used to be, back in the pre-computer era, that when you were moving a comic book through production, the last step before you got to the coloring was to finalize the black-and-white line art. You'd get all the pictures and lettering done and proofed and corrected and you'd make stats of it all and then it would go to the colorist. So at the moment you finished the credits, the colorist hadn't started his/her job yet and therefore might be unchosen...or if chosen, might still change. So they just didn't worry about a credit for the colorist because it was easier that way.
In the mid-seventies, companies became a bit more sensitive about this and realized they were snubbing an important member of the team. So they went to a little more trouble and began inserting the name of the colorist even if it meant going back in later and inserting or correcting that credit, and it's now the norm.
Back in the sixties, especially the early sixties, the name of the guy who colored most Marvel books was Stan Goldberg. That's a photo of Stan up above. I took it last year at the New York Comic-Con. That's the guy who colored the cover to Amazing Fantasy #15. That's the guy who decided on the color schemes of most of Marvel's major original characters...the person who said, "I'm going to make the Hulk green!" Stan Goldberg.
Stan was and still is a fine comic artist who when he draws, works mostly in the "Archie" style. In fact, these days, he works mostly on the Archie comics. In the fifties and sixties, he drew in that manner for Marvel books like Millie the Model. He was also freelancing for Archie back then, which was another reason he didn't get (or want) credit for his coloring work.
The editors at the Archie company then didn't like their freelancers to freelance for other companies and especially to be involved in comics that aped the Archie style. To keep them from finding out what else he was doing, Stan didn't push for credit for his coloring work...and most of his Millie comics were signed just "Stan G." to preserve a bit of anonymity. There was even a period when he was especially fearful of Archie realizing he was drawing Millie so it was signed "Solly B.," and folks thought it was Sol Brodsky, Marvel's production manager and an occasional artist for the company. Nope. Sol was just lending his name to the effort so the Archie editors might not realize Stan Goldberg was drawing those comics. Stan got screwed on credits no matter what he did.
Stan didn't or couldn't color every single issue and at some point, as Marvel's publishing increased and he got more work drawing, others would do the honors, including Brodsky, Marie Severin, Bill Everett and a lot of other folks who either worked in the office or were related to someone who worked in the office. It always seemed like a good job for someone to give his wife or children. But from the late fifties up 'til around '67 or '68, the vast majority of those comics were colored by Stan Goldberg.
And before anyone asks: DC had a whole in-house department that consisted of Jack Adler, Tommy Nicolosi, Sol Harrison, Jerry Serpe and several others who did the coloring up until the early seventies when others began taking it over. One of these days, I should do a long, in-depth piece about coloring theories as they differed from company to company, and even over the years at the same company. For now, just remember the name of Stan Goldberg and mention it often. Given how little recognition he got in the past, he's deserving of as much as we can give him.
February 7, 2009
