About the shape and weight of a telephone directory, this book has room enough to live up to its subtitle—and more. It begins with legendary cartoonist Harvey Kurtzman and his creation of Mad
as a humor comic book in 1952 and continues to the present, artist by artist. Early artists tend to get more space because they helped create the magazine's style and also because some of them have continued to contribute drawings for decades. Jack Davis and Mort Drucker, for example, are each allotted eight pages, enough for an irreverent but affectionate biographical write-up and a variety of art samples. Lesser, later artists get a paragraph and one panel. Along the way, Evanier gives a lot of background information about the comics industry and about the process by which Mad
has been produced. In short, this is a book for people who are curious about individual artists, the history of Mad
magazine or comics as a business. Mad's success for half a century shows it has mastered the knack of laughing with its targets while laughing at them. Indeed, many of the celebrities the magazine has skewered over the years have felt flattered to find themselves the subjects of Mad
caricatures. It helps that so much of the magazine focuses on relatively nonthreatening subjects, such as popular culture and suburbia. The only political commentary cutting enough to draw blood is on Ronald Reagan. But clearly the Mad
staff knows what it's doing and has been doing it extremely well. (July)
