By Andrew A. Smith
McClatchy-Tribune News Service
May 20, 2014 -- Two men have died in recent weeks whose names you’re unlikely to know, but whose work you’ve probably enjoyed.
That is almost certainly true of Al Feldstein, who died April 29 at the age of 88. He’s not exactly a household name, but he has affected pop culture twice in powerful – if quiet – ways.
For one thing, Feldstein was the editor of MAD magazine for 28 years, helming that now-venerable institution from 1956 to 1984. It was under Feldstein that the magazine’s circulation hit its highest peak – more than two million monthly in the early 1970s – and it was Feldstein who assembled the original “Usual Gang of Idiots.”
Feldstein wasn’t the first editor of MAD, which began as a comic book in 1952 under the editorship of Harvey Kurtzman. Kurtzman was a brilliant satirist, but he was also a terrible businessman and meticulous control freak who wrote virtually the entire comic book and drew thumbnail sketches from which the assigned artists could not vary. The result was hilarious, but slow – Kurtzman not only didn’t make much money taking so long to do a single comic book, he kept blowing deadlines. To appease Kurtzman’s demand for more money, publisher William Gaines made MAD a magazine with issue #24 in 1955 … but Kurtzman left three issues later anyway.
In desperation, Gaines turned to Feldstein, a born editor who used inventory material from Kurtzman’s reign to fill issue #28, and parts of #29 and #30. By MAD #31 (January-February 1957) it was all Feldstein – as it would remain for almost three more decades.
It was Feldstein who hired Dave Berg (“The Lighter Side of …”), Al Jaffee and Joe Orlando. It was Feldstein who turned Mort Drucker into a caricaturist, which resulted in years of memorable movie parodies. It was Feldstein who hired Sergio Aragones to do “marginalia” – cute cartoons filling in page margins. It was Feldstein who hired Cuban political refugee Antonio Prohias, and thus “Spy vs. Spy” was born. It was Feldstein who turned a one-shot idea -- parodying the fold-outs in Playboy with a satirical “fold-in” – into a running gag on MAD’s back cover for decades.
It wasn’t Feldstein who came up with Alfred E. Neuman, but he did the most important part. Kurtzman first used the image of the gap-toothed boy with the goofy grin, which had uncertain origins in the 1800s. But it was Feldstein who married the name Alfred E. Neuman (one of many silly names used and re-used in MAD pieces) and the “What, me worry?” slogan to the image, creating a mascot he used to anchor the magazine.
Feldstein took his job seriously, and wrote occasionally about the value of questioning American values and challenging complacency. But he came by it honestly – it was the second time he had been hired by Bill Gaines to rot the brains of America’s youth.
The first time was at E.C. Comics, where MAD was born and where Feldstein was the editor of, usually the writer of, and sometimes the artist of, the stories that filled the pages of Crime SuspenStories, Haunt of Fear, Panic, Shock SuspenStories, Tales from the Crypt, Vault of Horror, Weird Fantasy and Weird Science, all published between 1950 and 1955.
These comics are now regarded as among the best and most influential produced in the 20th century, but at the time they were driven out of business by a howling mob of parents, politicians and religious leaders who were convinced that comic books caused juvenile delinquency. MAD was the only surviving title of the E.C. purge, and that only because it was already a magazine and no longer a comic book.
But survive it did, to become an institution that has inspired countless satirists and comedians. If you’ve laughed at Saturday Night Live, National Lampoon, the underground comics of the 1960s or the likes of Lenny Bruce, you may have Al Feldstein to thank. If you’ve enjoyed grindhouse-style movies, TV shows like Tales from the Crypt or just about any comics of the late 20th century, you may have Feldstein to thank again. And if you learned to question authority from an irreverent magazine written and drawn by the Usual Gang of Idiots, be sure and thank Feldstein.
Or if you just like flatulence jokes … well, there’s Feldstein again.
After “MAD,” Feldstein moved out west and returned to his first love, artwork. He became a painter of well-regarded outdoor scenes, as well as re-creations of some of his E.C. covers. As luck would have it, a biography came out just months before his death, Feldstein: The MAD Life and Fantastic Art of Al Feldstein (by Grant Geissman, IDW Publishing, $49.99).
The other recent loss in the comics community was the less-influential but widely respected artist Dick Ayers, who died May 4 at age 90.
Ayers broke into comics in the late 1940s, and almost immediately cemented his place in comics history by co-creating (with writer Ray Krank) the Western-themed supernatural character Ghost Rider, in Tim Holt comics in 1949. Ghost Rider proved so popular that he graduated to his own title in 1950, and was only put in his grave for good by the same mid-‘50s comics hysteria that killed E.C. Comics.
Years later, Marvel Comics published their own Western-themed, non-supernatural Ghost Rider character with an identical look after the original GR copyright lapsed. Who did they get to draw it? Dick Ayers, of course. (Marvel later re-used the name Ghost Rider for a modern horror/superhero biker character that has starred in two movies.)
But where Ayers is familiar to most fans is his work for Marvel Comics in the 1950s and ‘60s. He inked a lot of monster stories in the 1950s that were drawn by comics legend Jack Kirby. And he was a mainstay at Marvel in the 1960s, during what is called the Silver Age of Comics – and an explosion of superhero characters. Ayers was often an inker on the very first of those books at Marvel, Fantastic Four, again over Kirby’s pencils. He also did quite a bit of penciling himself, not only superheroes like the Human Torch in Strange Tales but Western books like Rawhide Kid.
Finally, it was in the late 1960s that Ayers made his most lasting contribution, a 10-year run drawing Sgt. Fury and His Howling Commandos. That series, set in World War II, was originally a typical gung-ho war book, but took a more thoughtful turn under Ayers and writer Gary Friedrich that is fondly remembered today.
Comics creators don’t always get the credit they deserve. But credit is exactly what Feldstein and Ayers should have.
Contact Captain Comics at capncomics@aol.com.
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