Legion World Forums LEGION COMPANION Dr. Gym'll's Cultural Rarities OBITUARIES

Art Lortie reports FRED KIDA's obituary...

http://www.tcj.com/fred-kida-1920-2014/

AL FELDSTEIN @ 88

http://www.cbc.ca/news/arts/al-feldstein-former-mad-magazine-chief-dead-at-88-1.2627522

Such a great magazine, full of fun and thought provoking ideas with him at the helm.

"...a taciturn, trigger-happy, psychotic, farblunget... DIRTY LARRY"

"Killerman! You've been on the case TEN minutes! What have you done about it?"
"Well, I searched the Ponderosa, I bashed in the O.K. Corral, and I splattered the blood of ten Mexican banditos all over Juarez."
"Poor Clint. He's done so many spaghetti westerns, he's got his movies confused!"

MY favorite parts of MAD were always the movie & TV parodies (incorrectly called "satires"). I actually had "DIRTY LARRY" open & on my lap the night I watched my very 1st Clint Eastwood movie on TV-- "DIRTY HARRY"-- so I could follow along in the mag as I watched the film.

"Now comes the part where I slowly continue to eat my lunch as I calmly shoot 3 bank robbers. Actually, the sight of all this blood gives me quite an appetite."

I loved the writing, but I also loved the art of Mort Drucker (movies) and Angelo Torres (TV shows). Their styles were similar, yet Torres, rightly, had a "smoother" style, which fits for TV shows, as they tend to be "cleaned up for family audiences".

Not long before he retired (I never actually took note of when he vanished from the mag), there was a brief period where they began to feature 2 or even 3 movie parodies per issue, as there were more films than usual they wanted to cover.

The peak had to be the issue when Torres, as usual, did a TV show, Drucker did a movie, JACK DAVIS did a 2nd movie, and most absurd of all, Don Martin did a 3rd movie! And HIS feature was on the cover-- illustrated by BORIS VALLEJO!! ("Conehead The Barbituate")

"RUMBLE!!!!!"
"Spook! What was that?"
"That, Captain, was an 8.692 amplitude shock wave."
"How can you tell?"
"You see this instrument? The little hand fell off Donald Duck."

"Hey, Shiv! You dig school?"
"You bet. It's the one place the cops wouldn't think of lookin' for me!"

DICK AYERS / R.I.P. at 90

Nuts. I hadn't heard back from him in some time (he used to answer my e-mails). Awhile back, he'd invited me to a comics show he was appearing at in northern NJ, but i wasn't able to go, both money & car troubles. I did meet him back in the mid-90's, and came away with the impression that he was one of the NICEST guys who had ever worked in the business.

In recent years, thanks to Bill Black's AC Comics reprints and then online research, I came to LOVE his work from the 50's as much or more than his inking from the 60's.

He pencilled EVERY single appearance of the original GHOST RIDER-- U.S. Marshall Rex Fury!

Before Nick Simon's Silver Age Marvel site went down (a little over 3 years ago), I'd been building a virtual "shrine" to Ayers' work, in the western section, and in particular, the GHOST RIDER section. I managed to post covers of every single comic Rex Fury appeared in-- even tthough not one of them was ever published by Marvel.

I've got "restorations" of a lot of them at my blog now...

http://professorhswaybackmachine.blogspot.com/2011/09/ghost-rider.html

H.R. GIGER / R.I.P. at 74

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/05/13/hr-giger-dead-alien-artist_n_5314408.html