Tag Archives: MAD magazine

Atlas Comics Library No.8: Snafu. (Snafu 1-3, 1955-1956). Seattle: Fantagraphics. 256pp. $39.99.

Review by Paul Buhle

A close look at Snafu suggests what is behind the behindess of popular culture in its pulp-industry glory days, just before professors discovered the paperback market for their prospective (or imagined)  best-sellers. A dozen versions of Seventeen or other magazines for adolescent girl-readers; more dozens for the home-bound household drudge, mostly short fiction; Hollywood glamour mags by the dozens; Men’s Magazines with adventures and salacious fiction of semi-nude women, alongside lion-hunting and such-like manly fantasies. Not to mention Hot Rod specials, Wrestling specials, big-selling Sci-Fi magazines with wonderfully crazy covers. All this miles below the respectable (and then still numerous) slicks like the Saturday Evening Post.

Mad Comics (1952-55), notoriously the brain child of Harvey Kurtzman, drawn by a handful of the greatest satirical artists of the age and best known for skewering the morals and manners of modern culture was also….a huge hit. So huge that it evoked, as its more hugely popular successor Mad Magazine would evoke, a not-so-small army of imitators. The best of them by a long stretch was Panic (1953-55), using many of the same artists but without the avant-garde “feel” expressed, for instance, in the April, 1955 Mad Comics satire of art history including abstract expressionism, seen through the imagined artistic life of Willie Elder, Kurtzman’s most intimate collaborator. Nobody else would even think to go that  deep, although when I asked Kurtzman about this most striking and unusual feature, he responded “it is amazing what you can do if you have pages to fill.” He was joking, I think. Maybe.

Kurtzman, resigning from Mad when his insistence that he own 51% ownership was turned down, famously tried to duplicate his success in Trump, Humbug and the final shot, Help!  Simply to name all the other Mad knockoffs during the 1950s-70s would be impossible, but they definitely include Eh!, Snafu, Frenzy, Cracked, Thimk, Loco, Frantic, Grump, Drool and Crazy. Cracked outlasted the rest by winning reader loyalty as a serviceable if second-rate Mad. Sick!, more literary pulp than comic, stands out as a kind of avant-garde response, an imitation Lenny Bruce on the page, easily adopted from the lesser stand-up comics of the day.

Kurtzman, when I pressed him for precursors of Mad Comics, suggested that the college humor magazines, especially in their post-war phase where censorship and political restraint wavered, had offered a model of sorts for what he wanted to do with something new. He and his artists would take on the world. The GI Bill generation that launched campus cinema clubs to see European art films and sometimes protested racial discrimination wanted something more than a handshake from the society that sent them to war. Through the 1950s and a bit further, college magazines continued to appear with issues banned for their sarcastic political commentary as well as overly sexualized prose and cartoons.

Snafu, like  nearly all of the other Mad imitators, had no such ambition, although  repeated, not-very-humorous references to violence may indirectly reflect wartime memories and unintentionally express PTSD. “The Funniest Magazine in the World” (an overly ambitious claim, to say the least) lasted four years in the middle 1950s, the  normal run for a Mad Comics imitator. And it had several veterans of Kurtzman’s project, mainly artist John Severin and his sister Marie, a letterer who could obviously go beyond her domain to produce parody photo manipulations.

The expansive introduction by Michael J. Vassallo may itself be worth the price of the book to scholars. Both meticulous and incisive, at least when the fannish generosity of appreciation does not get in the way, it tells us what we need to know.  We learn that businessman-publisher Martin Goodman, known earlier for the formative Timely Comics, is in charge here, if doubtless preoccupied by the wider scope of his empire. For a while, Stan Lee clocked in as an executive employee and continued in the boom years to reign over dozens of titles with a small army of underpaid contributors. Eventually, along with assorted and lucrative “monster” magazines, Goodman himself would publish Kurtzman’s Help!. And kill it for the crime of low revenue.

Goodman himself, like many of the comic artists and writers, had seen military service—most of them in non-combat roles as educator/editors—and evidently identified with the sentiments of the Warner Brothers famed 1946 animated feature, “Private Snafu.”  Famously, the phrase “situation normal, all fucked up” was a familiar expression of ordinary soldiers none too fond of the Brass that lorded over them, especially because the overlording so often got in the way of whatever really needed to be done. This movie cartoon had been created by some of the animation greats, including Chuck Jones, Fritz Freeling, Bob Clampett and Frank Tashlin, “voiced” by Mel Blanc, and for millions of GIs, offered a much-needed laugh and some mental solace.

Then, seven years later, came Mad.  As popular among young adults as kids, its readership included plenty of GIs, many of them already familiar with Kurtzman’s bravely realistic, arguably antiwar war comics. It was apparently Stan Lee, still hardly a name outside of the comics industry, who came up with a knockoff of Mad for the growing Goodman empire.

Snafu closely followed teen and funny-animal humor of the same company, published under titles like Millie the Model, Patsy and Her Pals,  The Monkey and the Bear, Girls Life, Homer and the Happy Ghost and My Girl Pearl. Among them, Wild, Crazy Comics and Riot all imitated Mad, but none with the energy or success of Snafu. A comics art veteran, Joe Maneely, was chosen along with John Severin to carry the serious artistic weight, issue after issue, with Mad veteran Russ Heath among others on the side.

Vassallo comments that the humor writing in the comic aspires to be at Mad level, but “unfortuntely, Lee is no Kurtzman,”  and “sometimes very funny, but frequently juvenile” (p.xx). This is an understatement of considerable weight. The cover of the volume—a young woman in panty girdle and bra, seen from the back but clearly holding onto a subway loop, with an all male cast in the foreground reading Snafu rather than looking at her— already suggests juvenile humor of boys turning toward sexual interests a little nervously, as funny or strange. Very very Snafu.

The art, numerous steps downward from  the EC standard, looks rushed, the gags pretty obvious. Albeit sometimes contemporary: “Good News for Men Over 40…Who are Frequently Tired and Worn Out.  You’re Draft Exempt!” A Korean War joke or a memory of WWII? Sometimes the jokes are a bit worse, as in “TV Programs This Week”: “Evelyn runs away from reform school because [her] boy friend is always smacking her with the palm of his hand. She finally finds true love with Jack Gonng, prize-fighter, who hits her only with a closed fist.” (p.15, November 1954.)

On the last page of the introduction, Vassallo asks why these highly ephemeral efforts failed and were, so to speak, never heard from again. He reiterates that Mad really was the original, attracting the best artists with the best editors and production, while Snafu and others in the Goodman barn could never, by their nature, be more than imitations.

There is much to be said for this interpretation. Yet, as Vassallo insists, the seriously talented Severin obviously labored under rushed conditions and tight deadlines, turning out visual gags. We wince at the Burlesque Show jokes, the “Squaw” gags with pretend-Indians and the assorted gender jokes that would not survive “Me Too” complaints of a later day. Snafu does a lot better, arguably hits a high point, with one repeat feature, well-drawn imitations of famous cartoon artists’ work, from the Saturday Evening Post to the New Yorker, not to mention 1000 Jokes and other low-class pulps that would disappear from the news stands before 1970 or so. The various artists who created these pages obviously did their homework.

Seen from another standpoint, the repetitive sex-joke format of Snafu issues may seem further from Little Annie Fanny (Kurtzman and Elder, later on in Playboy) and closer to the tradition of Captain Billy’s Whizbang of the 1920s-30s. Updated to suburban life and its consumer pleasures with built-in frustrations, it loses the old sex-crazed undergraduates—often male and female alike—of the campus and the sailors, not to mention the naughty talking parrot of the college landlady. Snafu offers, one might say, a last look backward on another time and another world of comic art.

With two issues of Snafu under his belt, Goodman launched Bunk!, made up almost entirely of retouched photos and gag commentaries, as if the butt of the joke is actually Confidential, just then a new hit in the exploitation trade. Then comes Riot, soon dumped and  then revisited in short order, itself spun off to monster-satire features like Melvin the Monster. Still other, seemingly endless  spinoffs follow until Atlas itself implodes. The lead artists of these efforts evidently go on, but not, I think, to greener pastures. Some made it to advertising, a long-wished goal of comic book artists, at first barred or limited by their Jewishness, and then less so. By then,  the golden age of printed satire is over. At least, according to this critic.

Paul Buhle