Someone named Marv Wolfman (I never heard of him, either) suggests I mention that MAD's Greatest Artists: The Completely MAD Don Martin — the book mentioned here — only includes Martin's work in MAD magazine, emphasis on the "magazine." It does not include the material from his wonderful paperback books. I'm not sure it even includes stuff he did for some of MAD's special editions. But jeepers! That's still twelve hundred pages of Don Martin for under twenty bucks...
And you may be able to get it even cheaper! Tom Mason writes that he entered discount code W3P3V9Y on the Barnes & Noble site and this knocks the price of the most expensive item you order down by 15%. Since he ordered something else to put his order total over $25, he got free shipping and the Don Martin book was only $16.98. If this keeps going on, they'll be paying us to take copies off their hands.
Here's one of those rare opportunities to get yourself a great piece of artwork and do a good deed at the same time. The late Russ Manning was a fine artist and a fine gentleman. Most comic fans know his work drawing the comic book of Magnus, Robot Fighter, and the comic book and strip of Tarzan, and the newspaper strip of Star Wars. He only did the last of these for a brief time before failing health forced him to hand it off to others.
Fewer know that Russ was equally proud of his community work. He lived in an outlying, rather rural section of Orange County in California where he was an officer in the local Volunteer Fire Department. It was not uncommon when you were talking to Russ on the phone to suddenly hear an alarm going off in his end of the call. He'd immediately say, "Gotta go" and hang up on you, then dash off to go rescue some neighbors' property. Not uncommon at all. And I don't know about you but I respect the hell out of a guy who does stuff like that.
Russ passed away in 1981. Recently, his widow (a very sweet lady) has been having medical problems and therefore financial problems. Friends and family members have been helping out and you can help. At the Comic-Con next week, there will be several originals from the Star Wars newspaper strip in the Art Show and they'll be up for auction or even direct sale. They were drawn by Russ with the help of talented aides, especially Rick Hoberg...and they are extremely rare. He didn't do that many and the few that have been let out went swiftly into private collections of rabid Manning (and Star Wars) fans. So this might be your only chance to get one...and like I said, you can also do a good gesture at the same time.
The bargain of the year has gotten bargainer. The big 1200-page book called MAD's Greatest Artists: The Completely MAD Don Martin was originally $142 and it wasn't overpriced for that amount. It's a handsome collection of everything the great Don Martin drew for MAD, along with little essays about him by friends and co-workers. I got mine at a price slightly discounted from that and I felt I'd gotten my money's worth.
But then I told you here that it had been dropped to $25, which is quite a plunge. I mean, even Mel Gibson's popularity hasn't dropped that much. Several hundred of you pounced to order copies from Barnes & Noble through my links and many wrote to tell me how happy they were with their score.
Barnes & Noble ran out of them. Then they got some more. Then they ran out of them. Then they got some more. Then they ran out of them. Now, they have some more and they're down to $20. That's insane. If you needed a good doorstop that weighed this much, it would cost you more than twenty bucks. I'm guessing we may be down to the copies that have more dings and defects in them but if you ran a Buick over a copy of this book, it would still be worth more than $20 in the resulting condition. So here's a link to order one.
But wait! That's $20 plus shipping. Wanna get out of paying for shipping? If you already have a Barnes & Noble card, you don't pay shipping so that problem's solved. If you don't have such a card, order something else and get your order up to $25 to qualify for free shipping. Depending on where you live, that may even be cheaper than paying postage.
By the way: Here's something I don't understand. Amazon usually matches or beats anyone else's prices on things like this but for this item, this is the situation: They're selling it on this page for $94.50 and on this page for $58.50 and they also front for a whole bunch of online retailers who are selling it new for $29.90 and up. The $94.50 page currently says that they're almost out but more copies are on the way, which would suggest there are people paying that price for it even though if they read the fine print on that page, they could save sixty bucks. As far as I know, these are all copies of the same book from the same press run. It's enough to make a Don Martin fan go "Voink!" or "Greep!" or even "Sprizzit!"
Kevin Drum tackles the argument over whether the Bush tax cuts should be allowed to expire. It's amazing to me how many of our public officials and pundits seem devoted to the idea that the only thing that matters in this country is shifting the paying of taxes off the richest Americans and onto...well, anyone else or maybe even to no one.
The video quality of this isn't great but it's certainly worth a look. In 1960, the Bell Telephone Hour presented a highly-compressed version of the classic Gilbert and Sullivan operetta, The Mikado. The cast included Dennis King, Stanley Holloway and Helen Traubel...but the show was stolen and never returned by Groucho Marx. He played Ko-Ko, the tailor turned Lord High Executioner. Despite the odd casting and the many deletions in the show, a lot of people feel it was one of the best presentations ever of The Mikado. Here's Groucho performing Ko-Ko's big song...
July 15, 2010
