BOOK REVIEWS Mad Art: A Visual Celebration of the Art of Mad Magazine and the Idiots Who Create It, by Mark Evanier. Illustrated. New York, Watson-Guptill Publications, January 2003, 304 pages, $24.95. ISBN: 0-8230-3080-6.   This is a comprehensive history of Mad Magazine. Well, practically every book about Mad is so well-written that it is a comprehensive history of the magazine. That is certainly true in this case. It is also a comprehensive collection of mini-biographies of 75 artists who have become closely-enough identified with Mad to be included in the ranks of Mad's famous "usual gang of idiots." "A visual celebration of the art of Mad Magazine" could have been little more than a random hodgepodge of sample panels by some of the different artists who have drawn for Mad during its fifty-year history. Instead, all of Mad's artists (with a very few minor, acknowledged exceptions) are represented here. Each drawing is identified by artist, title, writer (when the writer was not also the artist), and issue in which it appeared. Cartoon-historian Evanier begins with a succinct yet complete overview that describes the conditions under which Mad came to be created in 1952; the creative and commercial goals of its publisher and founding editor; and its evolution since then. There are also separate articles, placed roughly as chapter headings to divide the generations of artists by the decade, on how Mad's editors select their artists; how a visual "article" in Mad comes to be created and how the artist works; and how Mad's art editors fulfill their duties. The bulk of the book is its "About the Artist Dept." profiles of Mad's artists. The arrangement is roughly chronological, from 1952 to the present. Mad's most important artists, who helped to define its personality and were truly among "the usual gang of idiots" during its first three decades, get from five to nine pages apiece: Harvey Kurtzman, Jack Davis, Will Elder, Wallace Wood, George Woodbridge, Sergio Aragones, Paul Coker Jr., Don Martin, Al Jaffee, Dave Berg, and so on. The newer artists, who have been with Mad for only the past ten or twenty years, get usually from two to four pages apiece: Richard Williams, Gerry Gerstein, Tom Hachtman, Hermann Mejia, Roberto Parada, Drew Friedman, and more. Some have joined Mad so recently -- or drew for Mad so seldom instead of becoming regular contributors -- that they get only a page or less apiece. The lengthier profiles usually include the artist's self-caricature portrait, date of birth, artistic background, how he (very rarely she) discovered Mad, his artistic specialties and distinctive traits, how he works, and what happened to him if he is no longer working for Mad (which usually is a brief statement of the artist's death, as in "Cancer got to him [Jack Rickard] in 1983"). The artwork ranges from enlargements of single panels to reductions of doublepages spreads to covers to preliminary sketches next to finished art. The selection usually covers the artist's whole career with Mad; for example, the profile of Mort Drucker contains selections from 14 features (mostly movie and TV parodies) from 1963 to 2002. Most of the art is printed in black-&-white but there are two color sections of 16 pages each. If you are interested in a history of Mad Magazine, this is the book for you. If you want a gallery of all the popular artists who defined Mad, with biographical notes, this is the book for you. -- Fred Patten

REVIEW ARCHIVE Animation Caricatures Cartoon Books Comic Books Comic Strips Journals REVIEW COPIES should be sent in duplicate, one to WittyWorld, 214 School Street, North Wales, PA 19454, USA, and one to the pertinent reviewer. ANIMATION & COMIC BOOKS: Fred Patten, 11863 W. Jefferson Blvd. Culver City, CA 90230, USA CARTOON BOOKS: Alfonz Lengyel, Fudan Museum Foundation, 4206 - 73rd Terrace East, Sarasota FL 34243 or Hongying Liu Lengyel, Keiser College, Library 6151 Lake Osprey Drive, Sarasota, FL 34240. COMIC STRIPS & CARICATURES: Dennis Wepman, 526 Liberty St., Newburgh, NY 12550, USA JOURNALS: John A. Lent, 669 Ferne Blvd., Drexel Hill, PA 19026, USA. Brazilian cartoonist reflects on employer-employee relations. The book ÓCIOS DO OFÍCIO (Leisure of Profession), lauched in July 2002 by Brazilian cartoonist Gilmar Barbosa, takes a look at the day-to-day lives of workers and managers. The book is a collection of strips published in the last six years in the newspapers Diário Popular and Diário de São Paulo. Currently, Gilmar's strips and cartoons are also published in O Pasquim21, Diadema Jornal, Profissional & Negócios, Você S.A. (all in Brazil) and Vida Econômica (in Portugal). Gilmar can be contacted at the following e-mail: gilmar@canbras.net