Well, I’ll be bumfuzzled.
I guess my memory of those ol’ reprints ain’t all t’were cracked up to be. Whoops. I miss the Potrzebie stuff, though, like Camp Pot - R - Zebie. (And thanks for reminding me why it was hard to pronounce to everyone’s satisfaction.)
Since the death of Gaines, Mad has totally gone downhill.
Does anyone remember the comparison of Alfred E. Newman with Prince Charles…looked just alike (with minor modifications). That was a crackup. This is dating me but it was when Prince Charles was in his early teens.
Yeah, I was born so long ago, I had to hide Mad from my mother.
As I understand the Don Martin Situation, the artists and writers at MAD were all doing “work for hire” and did not own any rights to their work. The publisher of MAD was wont to publish frequent collections of individual artists’ work, for example, the book The Completely MAD Don Martin. Mr. Martin apparently grew unhappy with his name being prominently used to sell books while he received not a dime in compensation. He demanded compensation and was denied, whereupon he moseyed on over to Cracked, the publishers of which were all too happy have him.
Sorry I can’t provide a cite - I heard the story verbally from the local comic book store owner several years ago.
IIRC, MAD owns the rights to all the works. In fact, the backs of the checks they paid to the artists and writers were contracts giving up rights to the work, which had to be signed in order to endorse the check.
Potrzebie is the Polish word for “necessity.” It first appeared in Mad in a parody of a comic book story that EC Comics had run earlier. Kurtzman “reworked” it largely by cutting and pasting text from various foreign newspapers. The large “Potrzebie” was uttered by itself, and for some reason became Mad’s plaything for a long time afterward. It really is a funny word. If you’re a purist, you can pronounce it pot-ZHEB-yeh. Personally, I like looking at the word and remembering how it befuddled me as a kid, and make no conscious effort to remember its proper pronunciation.
I still appreciate Mad, but I have found it difficult to buy it ever since they started selling advertising space. That bugs me to no end, particularly in light of Mad’s history of taking advertisers head on. The linked cartoon is fantastic, though.
Even though the later stuff still appealed to me, Harvey Kurtzman is a god. He influenced my life more than any other artist. (But don’t be too hard on the man for having done that—after all, he’s dead.)
Potrzebie and Furshlugginer. Words to live by
In the early days of MAD, Potrzebie was always in a special font which set it apart from all those other, non-potrzebie words.