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!
Alex Good 
Are these comics one’s you own, from the library, or read on line?
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These are ones I own. I don’t think the library carries MAD, and if they did these books are so old they would have fallen apart decades ago.
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Ah right. Just wondered why you had to get a pic of the cover from YouTube.
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I always pull the cover pics from off the Internet. With I think one exception so far where it just wasn’t available anywhere. Usually they’re better images than I could get just from snapping a pic of what I’ve got, especially if I’ve only got a beat-up copy.
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OK, as you were. 😁
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how does a comic book get put up on youtube? Is it a video of people turning the pages every 60 seconds or something? That just seems very odd to me.
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I think somebody put the whole book up. But the stories are separate files.
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See, that’s what I thought it must be. Now I want to rail against people too lazy to read a book but who will watch it on a screen.
sigh…
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In their defence, for this particular book they’d be hard pressed to find a print copy. The MAD paperbacks I have must be collectibles by now.
Sheesh. Just checked Amazon and a Used-Good copy (that does not not look nearly as good as the one I have) is listed for $1,958.50.
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Holy smokes, that is crazy. Totally crazy in fact.
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I would imagine they must be pretty rare. They were cheap paperbacks and got passed around and read a lot so they probably didn’t last long.
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Quick, to the Scanmobile, AAA! These national treasures must be preserved, STAT!
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Seems like the guy running that YouTube channel has beat me to it. And he did a good job. I’ll just wait for them to keep going up in price.
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What I want but haven’t gotten yet isn’t a Mad spoof but the National Lampoon Bond spoof, Alligator. It came out while Fleming was still writing the novels. The bad guys are called TOOTH (The Organization Organized to Hate. : -)
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I honestly didn’t read National Lampoon much back in the day. Must be archived digitally somewhere.
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