A Celebration of MAD: Superduperman!

[alicemacher]

It was truly a fershlugginer blecch day when the news broke on Wednesday that after 67 years, MAD Magazine will no longer publish new content. As of Issue #10 in August (the new numbering having begun last year), it will only be rerunning old material (with new covers) and will only be available in comic shops and through subscription -- no more newsstand sales.

Although few if anyone would deny the peak years of MAD have long since passed, there's no denying the tremendous influence it had on generations of cartoonists, comedians, film and TV writers, and others in the humour and satire field. Not to mention that, for many a kid from the 1950s onward, MAD was a subversive wake-up call, with the message that "grown-up" institutions such as the government, big business, advertisers, and mass media are, shall we say, less than 100% honest, ethical or even competent.



MAD began in 1952 as a comic (full title: Tales Calculated to Drive You MAD) from EC, edited and mostly written by Harvey Kurtzman. At first, Kurtzman used the title to satirize broad categories of comic books (horror, SF, western, crime). But by the fourth issue (Apr.-May 1953), he'd hit on the idea of parodying specific fictional works and franchises.

In "Superduperman" (art by Wally Wood), we see the pathetic, sickly Clark Bent, assistant to the copy boy at the Daily Dirt, pursue Lois Pain, who dismisses him as a "creep" (but accepts the pearls shown in the preview panel). When he learns there's a serial robber on the loose, he changes fumblingly into his superhero form.









Superduperman finally manages to defeat Captain Marbles by ducking a punch, such that Marbles knocks himself out.







This story, while funny in its own right, was also a satire on the National Comics Publications v. Fawcett Publications decision of 1951, which agreed with the claim of National (as DC was then known) that Captain Marvel constituted a copyright infringement on the Superman property and led directly to Fawcett's shutdown. (The story also drew the threat of a lawsuit from National, but EC publisher Bill Gaines, on his lawyer's advice, ignored the threat and the suit never happened. By today, of course, such parodies are protected legally in U.S. law as fair use.)

"Superduperman" was also Alan Moore's inspiration for his dark reimagining of former child sidekick Kid Miracleman.

Comments

[lordultimus]

Kurtzman hated superheroes, right?

It's definitely a deconstruction, albeit a comedic one, which is why it's one of Alan Moore's inspiration for his superhero works. In addition to the massive destruction a superhero battle would wreak here and Miracleman, we also have the divide between the hero identity and the real identity explored in Watchmen.

[tcampbell1000]

I haven't read many interviews with Kurtzman (though I did get through the autobiographical From Aargh to Zap). Still, I never got the impression Kurtzman had a serious mad on for superheroes: he adopted this same basic deconstructional form for Archie, Dragnet, Howdy Doody, and just about everything else. His gift was isolating and penetrating the nonsense and bullshit that underpins pop-culture icons, but he did seem to love them in a way... like a predatory animal loves its lunch.

[cygnia]

"Yer still a CREEP!"

Ahead of her time, this Lois.

[tcampbell1000]

Superduperman is arguably the most important story ever produced by Harvey Kurtzman or Mad. And it's aged remarkably well, with only the bits about changing in a phone booth and "spittoons" dating it a bit, partly because it has the good luck to be satirizing a property that remains familiar even in its details ("It's a bird," Lois, the Planet, etc.).

But my feelings on Mad in general are honestly kinda mixed. It and Cracked were a part of my childhood: I loved the idea of taking shots at celebrities and pop culture with a mix of lowbrow puns and sharper snark. Still do, but a lot of the writing in both periodicals feels a little samey to me now.

It's remarkable, and maybe a little sad, that the comics parodies that formed the backbone of Mad (and Cracked in its magazine days) didn't go very far past the formula Kurtzman established: follow the beats of the thing you're parodying for a while, tick off your various observations of its absurdities like a checklist, use the illustrated format to keep smuggling jokes into the background, maybe pull some other icon in for a forbidden crossover, then kick down the load-bearing pillar that you regard as the central lie and let the rest collapse under its own weight. And if you can, do something meta for your punchline.

I have respect for Kurtzman's pioneering of that format, but the fact that it was continued sort of anonymously for sixty-odd years after he left may say more about its formulaic nature than about Mad's recruitment of the best and brightest. To be fair, Mad had a lot else going for it for most of its run, but at the end of the day, Spy vs. Spy, Sergio Aragones, Don Martin, the fold-ins, and the other mainstays didn't have the cultural cachet that the Kurtzmanesque parodies did.

In that light, I think it's amazing that Mad lasted this long. While the influence of Kurtzman and his imitators is clear on everything from SNL to ZAZ to Matt Groening to Seth Macfarlane to The Onion, the terms "irreverent" and "institution" are a little bit contradictory. At what point do you start to become part of the pop-culture world you mock? Does it maybe happen after you get bought by the same company that publishes Superman, the one that also bought Shazam? Or does it happen after people start praising your "influence" on other works of satire that are seen by more people? That's why MadTV always seemed a little like an afterthought: there already was a Mad TV, it was just called Saturday Night Live.

The makers of Cracked, seeing the changes in the media landscape, were wise to rebrand the publication from the tamer Mad into a Web entity, even if they may have sacrificed its identity in the process (Cracked.com still calls itself a "humor site," but most of its article titles are indistinguishable from any other clickbait listicle).

In another timeline, Mad would now be offering up an ARG that Kurtzmanized any media you viewed it through. But for better or worse, its higher-ups had New York in their veins and couldn't swap it out for Silicon Valley. Or for Hollywood, really. And certainly not for Burbank.

[tcampbell1000]

I feel a little bad about the above post, and I hope it didn't kill any enthusiasm for the celebration.

I know a lot of people are mourning Mad, not least the cartoonists for whom it was basically the last place to reach newsstand readers with long-form content. And I'm mourning it too, in my way: I certainly miss the idea of Mad, and if its central features were formulaic, that formula was a good one. I could probably have been less dismissive of its secondary features, which were certainly inventive and fun, especially Spy vs. Spy and the Mad Fold-In.

My wife and I got the Mad Magazine game and played it last night, and we'll be donating a copy of it to our local board-game-themed restaurant.

I dunno. Maybe the root of my ambivalence is that I need a little more positivity these days. Mad's gleeful cynicism feels a little less empowering when not surrounded by a political era that's at least trying to pretend it embodies higher values to anyone not a member of "the base." The Nib is another source of cartooning satire that's (probably) going away in all but name before the end of 2019, and I should be more upset about that, I know a couple of its contributors. But every time I saw its slogan-- "Rise and shine. The world is doomed"-- it just made me angry, and not angry at the world, angry at The Nib. Like, hope is a moral imperative, now and always. Do better.

The classic Mad formula is great at breaking shit in our culture. But that shit's already broken. We need builders now, as our late-night comedians seem to understand. And I'm sure some people at Mad understood it too, but after flipping through a recent issue of theirs a month or two ago, I get the impression that not enough of them did, or not well enough, or the ones who did didn't have enough clout.

I miss Mad, and its contribution to the history of satire is undeniable. But like The Simpsons and other past-their-prime icons of satire, I think I'll miss it more once it properly goes away.