By A Longtime Reader
Fri, May 14, 2021 9:13 p.m.R.I.P. from Mad Magazine
Dear Mr. Stix,
Here's a totally non-political item which I hope that you will find of interest.
I just learned of the death on April 5 of Frank Jacobs, one of the chief writers of Mad Magazine. Here is an obit for him:
Among many other things, he wrote parodies of well-known poems. Remember the line about the place "Where Alf the sacred Neuman ran" from his spoof of Coleridge's "Kubla Khan"?
This follows last year's death (Apr. 9, 2020) of their cartoonist, Mort Drucker:
A still older Mad Magazine contributor, cartoonist Al Jaffee, retired only last year at age 99 and is still with us:
(I like the smart-alecky look of his in that Wikipedia photo.)
Question #1: Does working for Mad increase one's longevity?
Question #2: Was Mad staffed exclusively by Jewish guys?
Not entirely. It's true that the magazine's editor for 29 years, Al Feldstein (1925-2014) was Jewish, as was Mad's founder and longtime publisher, William M. Gaines (1922-1992). (His father, Max Gaines, a pioneering comic book publisher, had changed his name from Ginzberg.)
However, some of my favorite cover artists were not Jewish, namely Kelly Freas and Frank Frazetta. They both created wonderful parodies of then-current ads on the magazine's back cover.
Freas did "Presenting the Bill," lampooning Parke-Davis Pharmaceuticals' PR series of ads that featured "Great Moments in Medicine" (painted by Robert Thom).
My favorite Frazetta back cover was the takeoff on the Breck Shampoo series of ads that featured a beautiful girl.
2 comments:
Names from the past that gave me(and most of us) immeasurable amounts of laughs."Berg's Eye",Don Martin,TV show and movie satires were items I absorbed every month I could afford to buy a MAD magazine.
I think I still have some from back in the day--the pages are a little yellow,but not as yellow as the "comedy" being thrown at us today on TV and in print.
--GRA
Inspired by Jooz. Movers and shakers in USA humor much of which is not too humorous to me. My mother would not allow me to buy and read the initial issue of MAD.
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