(University of Missouri Press, 2020) So many of the histories of MAD magazine, and its Kurtz-maniacal comic book predecessor have been written by MAD contributors and/or published in conjunction with MAD itself that it is not hard to say that this exhaustive, massive, scholarly collection of essays, interviews, and historical indexes about MAD's artists, influence, history, and insanity may be the best book about to subject. It deftly and critically examines the way the most important humor magazine in American (possibly world) history made authority-questioning, rascally, 12 year old boys of all of us, regardless of age or gender. Ironically, one of the most insightful pieces is actually the kind of inside baseball thing we've seen before, as Paul Levitz, who oversaw MAD as a DC editor, interviews Al Jaffee and Nick Meglin about their experiences and work at the magazine. While largely laudatory, this collection is not another hagiography. Ann M. Caisullo critiques mainstream American culture's (and MAD's in particular) uneasy approach to tackling issues of gender and sexuality while at the same time celebrating the mundane magnificence of Dave Berg's humor. Nicholas Labarre exhaustively examines every appearance of Nixon in the magazine and suggests, perhaps due to untimeliness caused by the tyranny of the publishing schedule, they may have let him off easy. And Kerry Soper's analysis of Al Jaffee's Fold-Ins...well, it doesn't say anything bad about Jaffee because he's an artistic saint! Soper even, aptly and eye-opening-ly, compares him to Hieronymus Bosch. There are so many strong pieces in here by outstanding humor and comics scholars, and so much of it is written to be accessible to non-academics, that I cannot praise this brick of a book enough. I'm surprised they used the modern logo on the cover and not the classic one, so I can't praise them without caveat, but still can't do it enough.
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