Won't you be my neighbor?

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thrdgll
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Won't you be my neighbor?

Post by thrdgll »

Hey Gang,

Just an invite here to check out my new website featuring my illustration, caricature and comic strip work. Please be kind, you web-savvy souls. The world of websites is brand new to this old man:

http://thrdgll.tripod.com/index.html
thanks!

Ashley
sandy carruthers
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Wow!

Post by sandy carruthers »

Just came from your website - I love your caricature section! You should be working for MAD magazine(or, maybe you are...) Nice work! Is it all digital?
chrisSturhann
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Post by chrisSturhann »

The art looks great. I wish I could draw half that well. I wouldn't worry about the design of the site or not being web savvy. It looks great.

The only thing I would change is a small problem with the coding on the top page

http://thrdgll.tripod.com/index.html

The title in head is New Page 3

<head>
<title>New Page 3</title>
<meta name="GENERATOR" content="Microsoft FrontPage 3.0">
</head>

You should change it to whatever you want the title of your site to be. The text in title is what most browsers use when you bookmark something. Since it's your top page, the one people would be most likely to bookmark, it's probably worth changing.

Other than that, it's most excellent.

Chris
thrdgll
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Post by thrdgll »

Thanks for the tip, Chris. I'll see about fixing that index page.

As for Sandy's question, very little of my work is digital, but that's slowly changing. A handful of the pieces on my site are obviously created in a basic paint program with some Photoshop gimmicks here and there, but most of this stuff is "oldschool".

I'd love to work for Mad...as long as it was Mad circa 1965!

Thanks so much for the kind words!

Ashley
InkAddict
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Post by InkAddict »

thrdgll wrote: I'd love to work for Mad...as long as it was Mad circa 1965!
Yeah! I read the older issues too, and compared to the new ones they were much more free! Now it's the same type of puns & jokes over & over again... I still like Al Jaffee though, Great artist that guy is! (Wow! An unvoluntary Yoda-speak tm sentence!)
Check out my new site (under construction) at: InkAddict
thrdgll
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Post by thrdgll »

Yeah well, don't get me started on the current version of "Ad" magazine. I wish they would just give Mad a mercy killing rather than continue with the heretical publication on stands today. Mad used to be a kid's only source of information about "The Big Lie". You can't lampoon the consumer market and then run an ad for video games.

Ashley
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Post by InkAddict »

ADS in MAD?????

Whoa! Apart from the already huge collector's items' market I would never have thought this possible!







:cry: I sure miss Gaines :cry:
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chrisSturhann
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Post by chrisSturhann »

About ten, fifteen years ago I saw an ad in Mad Magazine and freaked. Then I looked closer and was relieved to see that it was just a parody. It was just done so well that it look real at first glance. A couple of months ago, I picked up a Mad and saw an ad, real this time. Must be tough on the people selling the ads. Have to make sure that you don't run a Buffy the Vampire Slayer ad the same month you're doing the Muffy the Vampire Betrayer TV satire.
thrdgll
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Post by thrdgll »

Unfortunately, the Buffy people would consider the parody a plug, which says a lot about how effective this once-subversive "satirical" magazine really is.

But don't get me started...

Ashley

PS- I remember those phony ads. Remember the "apologetic" editorial that accompanied them? No such apology when the real thing happened. It's just so sad. Alfred on the cover of the Land's End catalog....there's nothing meaningful to us that advertsing can't co-opt.
sandy carruthers
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Post by sandy carruthers »

I read MAD in the seventies, stopped in the eighties, than started dabbling with cover submissions in the nineties. These were rejected, and I found the mag lost its' satirical bite that I knew and love. The MAD of the millenium sucks. Even the occasional Mort Drucker can't save that sinking ship. I knew there was trouble when they introduced COLOR! Gaines must be rolling in his XL grave
Here's the cover submissions I had sent(and recieved reject letters for):

http://www.sandycarruthers.com/borgbabe.html

http://www.sandycarruthers.com/sumo.html

My favorite online humour/satirical site? http://www.modernhumorist.com/

Here's an idea! Lets do a satire of MAD magazine online! hee...hee we'll call it SAD Magazine.
Tailsteak
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Death of MAD

Post by Tailsteak »

I think MAD is ending with a whimper, rather than a bang... but that it must end. Our culture is now immersed in sarcasm and silliness, it is now stark, tactless honesty and openness that reaches the masses. MAD was needed, once upon a time. It will be needed again, and it will appear again in another form. It is not needed now.
thrdgll
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Pardon my soapbox....

Post by thrdgll »

I disagree. Our culture is so dominated by corporate media messages that honest communication is largely unrecognized. Mad, though not originally aimed at children per se, has always been most popular with pre-adolescents, who are entering a period in their lives where they are most vulnerable to manipulation by advertising. If Mad could be what it once was, it would be more valuable today than ever.

Again, what source does a child have for modern cultural satire that isn't underwritten by a corporate machine eager to create a new demographic?Kid's magazines are either byproducts of corporate kiddie tv (Disney Adventures, etc.) or almost completely void of cultural content at all (Highlights, Ranger Rick, etc).

Mad, when it was "pure", was the only publication explaining to kids, through satire, that the messages they ordinarily received from movies, tv, magazines and their subsequent advertising were all LIES. That they, the kids, were targets. That most adults who seemed to care about their welfare only wanted their money. This is an invaluable lesson that kids rarely get from mom and dad, much less Cartoon Network.

Obviously, Mad can't deliver this lesson anymore. Any attempt is the biggest hypocrisy I can imagine. There have been direct links drawn from Mad's (and the EC comics line's) influence on kids in the 50's to their subsequent counter-culture uprising in the 60's. This is debatable, of course. Personally, I think there's something to that supposed link.

What feeds the counter-culture uprising of tomorrow? Who tells the kids the truth about our mega-corporate mall culture? We sorely need it. And soon!

Ashley
Zem
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Post by Zem »

Wow... that sounds like a pretty heavy order. I could write a bad poem, or something. Ahem:

Advertising
Is so bad...vertising
And... stuff.

I'm not very good at this.
- Colin Langton
The person you love is 72.8% water.<a href="http://fan.bobandgeorge.com/Fancomics/C ... ml?4"><img src="http://gallery.passion4art.com/members/ ... m70x50.gif" align="right" border="0" alt="Darkling"></a>
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Post by InkAddict »

I've read (very) early MAD issues, and remember them spoofing things like Litterature TOO! To understand something like their "Raven" spoof, or their "Moby Dick" spoof, you had to have read the books!

Actually MAD used to also spoof things they VALUED, 'cause to understand a parody, you have to know the original. Anyone remember the classic Sherlock Holmes spoof? That was so full of litterary winks you had to read quite a few books to get 'em all! Remember the "Hitler-Frankenstein"? Those were the days.... *sigh*

Nowadays only TV and cinema gets spoofed. ...The content TV offers today is as lame as always and the movies they spoof are the low-quality popular ones too, so no spice in that either.

Ok, "Buffy" is a stupid name. So what? Why don't they go and do a parody on "American Beauty" or "Steel Magnolia"? People might actually want to go and see THOSE instead of the 2-hour Star Wars ads?

Trouble is they used to make MAD as a warped answer to the comics industry, and to mock things unmocked before. A little like "The New Yorker", which was an answer to the paper industry's bland blend. (MAD's founder Gaines used to edit the so abhorred but excellent EC Horror Comics) Now they just want to sell to their audience.

A New MAD will rise, only it won't be MAD. It'll be something so different even we will be amazed it was possible at first. (As I was amazed the USA could produce something as fresh as "The Simpsons", when it first hit the TV screen)

There's a future lying out there for Comics to grab hold of!
Check out my new site (under construction) at: InkAddict
thrdgll
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Post by thrdgll »

Ah yes, thanks for reminding me about the Simpsons. I feel a little better about the state of modern cultural satire now.

Ashley
chrisSturhann
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Post by chrisSturhann »

Yingo,

Your comments made me think of this time. I was about 12 or 13 and MAD did a movie satire of Chinaclown (Chinatown). My brother who is five years older than me read it and said it helped him understand some things that he didn't pick up in the movie.

I guess that's why MAD was so important. It helped you get the jokes. MAD sort of taught you that there was stuff going on beneath the surface that you had to look for to get it, and once you got used to looking under the surface, it helped you see through the BS in other things.

Hopefully, there will always be something like MAD, or The Simpsons, to do that. It would be sad to have a whole generation that just buys everything handed to them. Today's youth is often accused of rejecting everything. Maybe, the problem is that most of them never really learned how to sift through the BS, so they reject everything rather than rejecting the bad and embracing the good.

Chris
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Post by InkAddict »

I believe this is one of the reasons why comics are so important:

They are very popular because they make use of images to convey meaning... a little (though this is of course a clich? which doesn't say half of what is true) because you start "looking at the images" before you start to read!

They are very "young" in spirit: they were the only multi-media art around when "multi-media" as a word idn't yet exist!

They can hold many layers of information and meaning, unlike what is often considered as "popular culture"!

They are fast! (Comics can comment on current events, whereas movies/animation, like the simpsons, risk coming out after the events have already passed)

...and more importantly: they're the only popular art able to convey this easily the ideas of ONE person! No business plans are necessary to draw those few squares, and tell the world WHATEVER you want, whereas the least little idea needs a heap of cash in the other more commonly known "popular arts".

(Greg Stephens got a cameo appearance by Tom Cruise AND Dustin Hoffman in ONE ZWOL strip! What movie producer or TV tycoon could do such a thing without having to phone around and paying a load of cash?... Hey! It's the magic of COMICS exploited to its fullest ! :wink: 8) )
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Rip Tanion
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RE: MAD

Post by Rip Tanion »

Don't get me started on the decline of MAD.

I used to have a subscription to MAD from about '79 to about the mid-eighties. That's when I noticed it wasn't that funny any more. At first, I thought I had just grown out of that type of humor. But even today, when I look back at those older issues, I still crack up. Of course, some of those old great MAD artist have left this world. Don Martin died a few years ago (though I think he had already defected to Cracked by that time), and I read that Dave Berg died very recently (though I was never a big fan of The Lighter Side)

It really saddens me that MAD now carries ads. It's a shame, since they were constantly parodying the ad industry. In fact, I still have a copy of the book MADvertising (or Up Madison Ave.)(Signet 1972), by Dick De Bartolo and Bob Clarke. In it, they told you all the tricks the ad industry uses to sucker you into buying their products. By carrying ads themselves, I think MAD loses some credibility.
"Park the beers, and grab the smiles. It's flight time." - LtCdr. J. Robert "Bobby" Stone, USN (R.I.P.)
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