Their Satanic Majesties Request
I led a sometimes vaguely sheltered childhood (in the same sense that Dexter is sometimes vaguely implausible). But even at a young age, I always loved drawing crazy monsters, ghosts, and creatures, and during any trip to the local mom n' pop video store, I would excitedly examine the enticing covers in the Horror section. I didn't know yet that the covers were usually better than the movies, so they always carried such sordid, forbidden promise. (The cover for Return to Horror High, with a skeleton cheerleader, was a personal favorite... as well as the cover for Slugs, whose front cover showed a bloody slug oozing away from a dead woman's face, and whose back cover showed both a mutilated corpse and a chick peeling off her top in a rowboat.) The closest access I had to scary movies was through their scene-by-scene parodies in MAD Magazine... an obvious influence on my artwork, as nearly every reader of my webcomic has observed, because it stabbed me in the lower intestine when it still MATTERED.
I love watching horror movies now, whether they're good or bad, but they were somehow more influential when I couldn't watch 'em. MAD captured all the adult-ness I couldn't see, and also made it silly. I collected tons of back issues throughout my adolescence, and I still have 'em, all piled up, yellowed and stinking. In honor of Halloween, here are some chronological chunks from those issues' horror parodies... now less aromatic through the magic of scannin's!
"Hack, Hack Sweet Has-Been" (January 1966, Siegel/Drucker-- hey, Don Draper will be able to dismissively chuckle over this issue with his new bride! Who, despite naysayers, is a fucking AWESOME LADY!)
"Rosemia's Boo-Boo" (January 1969, Kogen/Drucker)
"The Ecch-orcist" (October 1974, Siegel/Drucker)
"Jaw'd" (January 1976, Siegel/Drucker)
"The Shiner" (March 1981, Siegel/Torres)
"Undressed To Kill" (April 1981, Kogen/Drucker)
"Arbor Day" (December 1981, Silverstone/Davis)
Personal note: This all-purpose slasher-flick parody, reprinted in 1988's "Mad Gross-Outs" special, is probably the most influential MAD article of my entire youth. I didn't know until many years later that every one of its details was spot-on... but I didn't need to wait until I could rent Halloween or Friday the 13th or Tourist Trap or My Bloody Valentine or The Prowler or Sweet Sixteen or He Knows You're Alone or The Burning or Prom Night to get the grisly details confirmed. Because MAD wouldn't lie to me. Also, the living legend Jack Davis is a fucking cartoonist's diety, and this article's young women made my nethers tingle long before I had any idea why.
"Paltry Guise" (March 1983, Kogen/Davis)
"Psycho, Too" (January 1984, DeBartolo/Drucker)
"Alienators" (January 1987, DeBartolo/Davis)
"A Mad Look at 'Nightmare On Elm Street'" (September 1987, Aragonés)
Sergio is one of two MAD artists I ever met face-to-face, at a comic convention where he kindly autographed tons of his paperback collections for me...
"The Violence of the Hams" (September 1991, Jacobs/Viviano)
... And Sam Viviano is the other artist I met, when I invaded the MAD offices during my first-ever trip to Manhattan in early 1999. Viviano was the mag's art director at the time. Maybe he still is, I 'unno.
Anyway, I woulda been 13 when this came out, so I didn't get Lecter's climactic, Reagan-invoking punchline... but now I think it's pretty funny.
"Drekula" (June 1993, DeBartolo/Drucker)
"The Bland Witch Project" (November 1999, Devlin/Wray)
This is around the time I let my MAD subscription lapse. By then I was renting actual horror flicks by the truckload, so I didn't need to live vicariously through MAD anymore... even if it was kinda more fun when I had been.
I love watching horror movies now, whether they're good or bad, but they were somehow more influential when I couldn't watch 'em. MAD captured all the adult-ness I couldn't see, and also made it silly. I collected tons of back issues throughout my adolescence, and I still have 'em, all piled up, yellowed and stinking. In honor of Halloween, here are some chronological chunks from those issues' horror parodies... now less aromatic through the magic of scannin's!
"Hack, Hack Sweet Has-Been" (January 1966, Siegel/Drucker-- hey, Don Draper will be able to dismissively chuckle over this issue with his new bride! Who, despite naysayers, is a fucking AWESOME LADY!)
"Rosemia's Boo-Boo" (January 1969, Kogen/Drucker)
"The Ecch-orcist" (October 1974, Siegel/Drucker)
"Jaw'd" (January 1976, Siegel/Drucker)
"The Shiner" (March 1981, Siegel/Torres)
"Undressed To Kill" (April 1981, Kogen/Drucker)
"Arbor Day" (December 1981, Silverstone/Davis)
Personal note: This all-purpose slasher-flick parody, reprinted in 1988's "Mad Gross-Outs" special, is probably the most influential MAD article of my entire youth. I didn't know until many years later that every one of its details was spot-on... but I didn't need to wait until I could rent Halloween or Friday the 13th or Tourist Trap or My Bloody Valentine or The Prowler or Sweet Sixteen or He Knows You're Alone or The Burning or Prom Night to get the grisly details confirmed. Because MAD wouldn't lie to me. Also, the living legend Jack Davis is a fucking cartoonist's diety, and this article's young women made my nethers tingle long before I had any idea why.
"Paltry Guise" (March 1983, Kogen/Davis)
"Psycho, Too" (January 1984, DeBartolo/Drucker)
"Alienators" (January 1987, DeBartolo/Davis)
"A Mad Look at 'Nightmare On Elm Street'" (September 1987, Aragonés)
Sergio is one of two MAD artists I ever met face-to-face, at a comic convention where he kindly autographed tons of his paperback collections for me...
"The Violence of the Hams" (September 1991, Jacobs/Viviano)
... And Sam Viviano is the other artist I met, when I invaded the MAD offices during my first-ever trip to Manhattan in early 1999. Viviano was the mag's art director at the time. Maybe he still is, I 'unno.
Anyway, I woulda been 13 when this came out, so I didn't get Lecter's climactic, Reagan-invoking punchline... but now I think it's pretty funny.
"Drekula" (June 1993, DeBartolo/Drucker)
"The Bland Witch Project" (November 1999, Devlin/Wray)
This is around the time I let my MAD subscription lapse. By then I was renting actual horror flicks by the truckload, so I didn't need to live vicariously through MAD anymore... even if it was kinda more fun when I had been.