‘Parody: The Best 1950s Mad Inspired Satirical Comics’ (review)

Introduction by Jay Lynch
Edited by John Benson
Art by Jack Davis, Will Elder, Norman Maurer,
Carl Hubbell, William Overgard, Jack Kirby,
Dick Ayers, Bill Everett, Al Hartley, Ross Andru &
Mike Esposito, Hy Fleischman, Jay Disbrow,
Howard Nostrand, and Bob Powell.
Published by Fantagraphics Books

The Sincerest Form of Parody was originally released from Fantagraphics about a decade back and I greedily grabbed it up.

At the time, I had just been working behind the scenes on Ger Apeldoorn’s Behaving Madly book for Craig Yoe about the black and white Mad imitations of the 1950s. This book, about the four-color Mad imitations of the 1950s, seemed the perfect companion. Now comes a re-release.

Back in then ‘80s, when everything cost less and I was making more money, I was actively collecting Mad rip-offs.

You see, EC’s original Mad color comic, although before my time, is my favorite comic book of all time. Even before I discovered its existence, I had been primed to like it by Marvel’s 1960s Not Brand Echh, Roy Thomas’s loving tribute to Harvey Kurtzman, et al.

With age comes knowledge, and I learned that EC Comics themselves ripped-off Mad with Panic. Panic was the only EC comic where I was able to collect every issue. But it didn’t stop there. There was also Whack, Flip, Crazy, Wild, and a half-dozen or so others. Without the guiding hand and ethnic comedy sensibilities of Kurtzman, they just weren’t the same…but they were still pretty good!

Mad had Wally Wood, Bill Elder, Jack Davis, and John Severin. Some of these other companies’ comics had Russ Heath, Al Hartley, Bob Powell, Bill Everett, Dick Ayers, Ross Andru, Howard Nostrand, and Norman Maurer. Timely (or Atlas, or…You know, the company that became Marvel) alone published several different parody titles.

One artist whom I personally feel was perfectly suited to parody-style humor was William Overgard, later known as the cartoonist on Steve Roper and Rudy He didn’t do too much, though. Another who did was Hy Fleischman, who gets six examples reprinted herein, second only to Nostrand’s seven.

For the most part, The Sincerest Form of Parody consists of full-color reprints from those long-gone comics once published by Harvey, Charlton, St. John, and others, even, as unlikely as it seemed to me at the time, reprints from EC and Atlas.

Davis and Elder represent the trend-setting EC Comics, but not from Mad, from Al Feldstein’s Panic, complete with the controversial cover that got the first issue banned in Boston.

To my mind, Harvey’s Flip and St. John’s Whack were by far the best, and actually funniest, of the imitations, and both are well-represented here. Jack Kirby and Dick Ayers, who would later bring readers all those memorable Atlas monster stories together, show up separately here, from the low-rent Charlton, of all places. Let’s just say humor was not either artist’s strong suit.

Also represented here is Ross Andru, later the main regular artist on Wonder Woman, Superman, and Spider-Man. Andru actually started his own company, MikeRoss, along with his longtime collaborator Mike Esposito, to publish their own parody comic, Get Lost (which eventually got its own reprint collection).

All in all, the stories here, nearly all based around topical references, are some of the best of their types, but your enjoyment of them in 2025 and beyond will likely vary based on how much knowledge you have of 1950s culture, both popular and otherwise.

The best bits for me are the nostalgic Introduction from the now-deceased underground cartoonist Jay Lynch (who once published a brilliant Mad parody himself in Bijou Funnies #8, with a Kurtzman cover, yet!) and the learned 25-page Notes section by John Benson that brings up the rear of the tome. Benson, who began as a fan author nearly six decades back, has a well-earned reputation as one of the great comics historians, particularly when it comes to EC. His writing here, illustrated and annotated, puts the history of the parody comic book genre into perspective and goes beyond that to give some additional history on later humor mags in general. An intelligent piece on some of the purposely least-intelligent comic books ever? Sure. Why not?

Booksteve recommends.