MAD’s Don Martin Comes on Strong

There’s no way I can divorce my reading of these MAD paperbacks from the memories I have of them from fifty years ago, when I was just a little guy. They’re real trips down nostalgia lane, and on that score alone I can’t not enjoy them.

These stories by MAD regular Don Martin haven’t dated as much as a lot of the other vintage MAD books I’ve reviewed here. There’s less cultural and political stuff being sent up and more gags. What’s surprising though is how well Martin handles long-form comic storytelling, even if his punchline style of humour still comes out in the violent final panels that have guys being flattened by steamrollers or locomotives, or struck by lightning (“KAR-RACKK . . . ZAP!”). There’s even a couple of musicals thrown into the mix, with a take-off on A Star is Born and a chaotic opera that fittingly ends up with a pile of corpses on stage. And for the highbrow readers (of which I’m sure MAD had many) there’s no question that “Beauty from the Beast” was inspired by Jonathan Swift’s “The Progress of Beauty” (1719). I’m sure I didn’t get that when I was a kid, but I remember being reminded of it when I first read the poem later.

As a final note, I was surprised to find when I went looking for images of the cover for this one online that several of the stories had been uploaded in full to YouTube. That’s a platform that truly is eating everything!

Graphicalex