Sincerest

Flattery be damned. In 1954-55, the hottest comic on the newsstands was MAD, from EC Comics. Almost everyone publishing comics books wanted to imitate it. And the ones who didn't want to imitate it, wanted to kill it off.

But I'm not here to talk about any of the villains who wanted to destroy MAD. I want to mention what EC Comics did to protect their extremely profitable spot on those newsstands. Since almost every publisher was trying like mad to imitate MAD, Bill Gaines and company just decided that the best thing to do was...imitate MAD!

If someone was going to steal some of their sales numbers, it might as well be themselves.

So what they did was create a companion book called PANIC. It had the same writers, the same artists, the same publisher, the same Jewish sense of humor. How could it miss? And the thing was, of course, to kill off the weakest of the imitators by causing the fans to buy PANIC instead of CRAZY or GET LOST! or FLIP or CRACKED or MADHOUSE or WHACK or EH! or...you get the picture. The imitators were out there in droves. Some of them were pretty good, too.

I haven't been concentrating on completing a set of PANIC, but I pick up copies when I see them at a good price. Despite the fact that they are, in essence, exactly the same thing as MAD from exactly the same creators at exactly the same publishing house, you can get these books for a LOT less than you can issues of MAD from the same period.

The last copy I picked up was #7. Sometimes the covers of both MAD and PANIC were kind of bland or uninspiring to me. Such is the case with this issue. But there was something about these special joke covers that seem bland to look upon that inspired the kids of the day to buy the darned things. I reckon they knew what they were doing.

Some day I need to write an essay of how Harvey Kurtzman was fucked out of his position at MAD. It was his baby all the way, and it ended up making the publisher, Bill Gaines, one of the richest men in comics. But for now I'll leave that where it is and save it for another time.

PANIC #7

An ad for MAD from Kurtzman and Elder.

Just as with MAD, much of the humor in PANIC was topical. Most people today have absolutely no idea who Joe Palooka was. Palooka is just a word they heard in PULP FICTION. But it was prime material for parody in 1955.

Jack Davis, one of the most popular comedy artists at EC.

THEM was a hot commodity and still new to the screens. Wally Wood has a go at it.

Wally Wood was a great caricaturist and nobody did women like Woody.

Everyone thinks Marvel was the first publisher to connect with the fans. How wrong those people are! EC was adept at making (and keeping) a connection with its fans. The editors printed fan mail, and they bragged about the men who were writing and illustrating the stories that the fans kept coming back to read.

The average American is introduced to Jewish and Yiddish humor. Nobody did that better than the guys writing MAD and PANIC.

FRONTLINE COMBAT #14

I just got another old EC for my collection. This one is FRONTLINE COMBAT #14 with a cover and first interior story illustrated by Wally Wood. Also in this issue is a great Civil War yarn drawn by Jack Davis. I was surprised to see a story by Joe Kubert in here. He certainly was someone who would have fit right in at EC, but I don't recall seeing his work in any of the EC books I've owned in the past. And there's a beautifully drawn WWI story by George Evans who excelled at illustrating tales of the flying aces.

Nice Wally Wood cover. A bit of a departure from his regular style.

BATTLE-GROUND

Battle-Ground was an Atlas war title (obviously). I bought this copy for the Russ Heath cover. Heath is one of the best comic artists who worked the industry, in my opinion, and is well known for his work on various war stories. He was a long-time artist on the Sgt. Rock series at DC.

This issue came out in 1954. Occasionally Goodman and Lee would land art from the EC artists. I'm not sure, but I think this issue came out around the time EC was having trouble from HUAC. During the time just before and just after EC's titles ceased publication (save for MAD which became a magazine to avoid the Comics Code Authority), many of the EC artists showed up doing work for Atlas. Of course some could not remain there because Atlas just didn't pay the rates they were accustomed to making at EC, which were among the highest in the industry.

But from time to time you'd see Jack Davis, John Severin, and even Bernard Krigstein showing up to produce stories for Goodman and Lee.

I was surprised at the quality of work in this issue of BATTLE-GROUND. I may end up having to purchase some more of these Atlas war comics.

Adventures on Ebay

I landed a copy of Panic #10 via Ebay. This was the first comic I purchased since a crooked dealer tried to rip me off there. I had bought three copies of Panic from a fellow I will leave unnamed for now. The books had been graded at "VG", which means very good. When the books arrived they were flaking, coming apart, two of them had detached covers, and the one that still had its cover attached was because the spine was heavily taped. I, of course, immediately demanded a refund which he did not want to grant. Hilarity ensued.


I have to say that Ebay was really good during this minor tussle. They demanded that the dealer in question refund my money and they even took a portion of it from him and added it back to my Paypal account, the remainder to be refunded as soon as I returned the worthless books, which I did.


This latest issue I got (from a more reputable dealer) is classic Harvey Kurtzman material. I will assume that he did the layouts. Much of the material seems to have his hand in evidence. But the bulk of the book was illustrated by Will Elder and Jack Davis, both of whom did their usual exceptional work. Davis, in particular shows his talent, but I have to think that Elder was filing off the edges of his art here--I think that while Kurtzman and Gaines intended Panic to be pretty much a carbon-copy of Mad, they were making some minor moves to tone down the harsher aspects of the humor of Mad in favor of appealing to a wider audience...or at least a slightly different audience. Unlike Mad, the last few issues of Panic received the Comics Code Authority approval. But obviously the sales were not up to Mad's level and the title was snuffed out.

PANIC #10.