WHY WALLY WOOD LEFT MAD MAGAZINE

That's the young Wally Wood above, maybe (I'm guessing) from the period just before Kurtzman began Mad in 1952. Wood was onboard starting with the very first issue.

That's Al Feldstein above, the artist and writer who became editor after Kurtzman left and the comic became a magazine.

Maybe there was some tension between the two men. Wood is said to have believed that the quality of writing had slipped under Feldstein and Feldstein described Wood as depressed and resistant to criticism.  Anyway the fateful day came when Wally delivered his famous last stories...all newspaper strip parodies... and Feldstein rejected them as "sloppy." Wally turned around and walked out for good.

Wood fans have long waited for someone to publish those last sloppy pages and finally someone has. Here (below) from the just published bio "The Life and Legend of Wallace Wood Vol.1" are the comic strips that got Wood fired.  Was Feldstein right? Were they sloppy? Judge for yourself.

Well, these certainly are wordy! Feldstein wasn't a bad writer...he wrote the fan favorite "My World"...but this wasn't his best work.

My guess is that Feldstein's plan was to contrast deliberately long-winded dialogue with with over-the-top funny drawings.  Unfortunately Wood had a painful medical condition that he attempted to self-medicate with alcohol. He also had a sleep problem. He just wasn't in a funny mood. Even so, you could argue that Wood's material was still adequate and Feldstein should have used it.

How would Wood have handled characters like these when he was healthy and inspired? Here's (above) an example of how he treated Little Orphan Melvin in the days when Mad was still a comic book.   

THE NATIONAL LAMPOON VS. MAD MAGAZINE

Until I saw a documentary on the subject at Steve's, it never occurred to me to compare the National Lampoon to Mad Magazine. After all, the two magazines were aimed at different audiences: Mad to high school kids and the Lampoon to college students and twenty-somethings. I liked both for different reasons, though Mad had already slipped into a rut by the time the Lampoon came out.

Later on, the Lampoon got in a rut as well but that didn't stop them from declaring war on Mad. Yes, war! They said Mad wasn't funny!

Well, I guess it wasn't by the time the Lampoon skewered them.

Yikes! NL's parody of Mad (above) was scathing. It drew blood! The Mad people must have had a bad day when they read it.

Mad took the criticism (above) to heart, however and, though it took years, eventually Mad adopted the Lampoon's adult, drug culture, dead baby joke, Republicans-Are-Mentally-Defective stance.

The problem was, that approach was obsolete by the time Mad adapted it.  Generation Y and the Millennials weren't averse to radical politics but they preferred to wrap it in a different kind of comedy.  

Mad lost its way. 

Since I'm a fan of the old Harvey Kurtzman Mad, I thought I'd mention a couple of things that magazine did right.

For one thing, Kutrzman's Mad (above) aimed for kids and adults alike. I'm not against cartoons for adults but the fact remains that kids form the core audience for cartooning and probably always will.  Deal them out and you deal out the future of your medium. You create a generational divide.

Also, Kurtzman's Mad put an emphasis on the unique artwork. The Lampoon was a writers magazine that used artists; Mad was an artists magazine that used writers. Too much of the Lampoon art was generic. 

Mad also had some first-rate artists in their best years, artists like Don Martin (above), Wally Wood and the young Jack Davis. The Lampoon had artists too, but they were mostly there to illustrate writers ideas. The writer was the star.

At the risk of stating the obvious, writers and artists see the world differently. If writers had conceived the Mad "Beautiful Girl" cover (above) they would have picked a specific target to make fun of...some female in the news who they thought deserving of ridicule. Mad artists like Basil Wolverton (above), on the other hand, seemed to prefer to make fun of the very idea of beauty. That's what artists do best.

Why that is, why cartoon art works best when addressing the human condition in general, I can't explain. Haw! I can already think of exceptions to what I just said, but for the sake of brevity I'll stick with my point.