The Legendary Comix Ripoff Ruse

The Legendary Comix Ripoff Ruse

Somewhere between Capp and the eight-pagers lie the comic parodies that crop up from time to time in college humor magazines. Although they are not always obvious tracings their visual appeal usually leaves something to be desired. They are often vulgar and occasionally bawdy but they never have the outright sexual frankness of the eight-pagers. None-the-less their increasing popularity was recognized by Harvey Kurtzman, editor of Mad comics. At first Mad did comic take offs on old movies and other television stuff. In issue number four, Wallace Wood did a story featuring Superduperman and Capt. Marbles fighting it out for the super hero championship. From then on Kurtzman had Wood lampoon at least one famous comic series in each issue of Mad . Wood tended toward two fisted action strips like Black and Blue Hawks, Teddy And The Pirates, Bat Boy and Rubin, and Little Orphan Melvin. His approach was the same as Al Capp’s. He rendered the entire strip he was ripping off into his own style, which is considerable. In Mad 10, Bill Elder switched from doing movie/TV parodies to comic rip-offs. His first effort Woman Wonder didn’t have much of a premise, but it showed Elder to be the world’s greatest cop-artist. Like the eight-pagers he used exact replicas of the characters he was ripping-off. These characters and their supporting paraphernalia would exist in a “real world” of Elder’s innocuous backgrounds. In this format the reader once again got a behind the scenes point of view. In Mickey Rodent you could really believe that you were watching Mickey and Donald daw away at each other over who was the top character in Disneyland. Starchie depicts the whole Riverdale gang trying to deal with real teenage life in a large city. (Betty put out and carried reefers in her purse). Eventually Elder got so carried away he would rip-off characters from several comics and put them in the same story. Mickey Rodent showed up on Howdy Dooit. Little Orphan Annie mistook Jiggs for Daddy Warbucks in Bringing Back Father. And, in his more remarkable effort Poopeye, Mammy Jokeum, Melvin of the Apes, and Superduperman are all hired by a cigar chomping Swee’back (Sweetpea) to get rid of Poopeye so he can take over the strip.

Unfortunately Mad changed its format and broadened its horizons at this point. Although Kurtzman continued to feature Elder in his various publications the heyday of comics was clearly over. Soon both men settled down to doing Little Annie Fannie for Playboy where they trade on the concept of bringing together who’s who in the media biz. Where else can you get J. Edgar Hoover and Frank Sinatra in the same comic? But being a purist, I long for the days when Elder was ripping-off comic characters.

The 1960’s brought a resurgence of juper heros both in comic books and in animated cartoons made for TV. Wonder Warthog, the world’s only super anti-hero snuck in there somewhere along with Spiderman and the Hulk . Drawn by Gilbert Sheldon who originated the strip when he should have been paying attention in college, The Hog of Steel is to super hero comics what Fearless Fosdick was to cops and robbers comics. After college Wonder Warthog was featured in Kurtzman’s HELP. Then he moved over to Drag Cartoons, a west coast hot rod comic magazine. At Drag Wonder Warthog got to be pretty cool, driving a lot of fast cars and thinking badly of the fuzz. When it came to politics, however The Hog of Steel showed his basic lack of intelligence. He went from a positive position on civil rights in HELP to actively fighting

the Viet Cong on the pages of DRAG. I just couldn’t stand to see a bad character go good and I was determined to let Sheldon know about it. Summoning my meager tracing ability, I turned out the ripoff strip you see on the ajoining page, and ran it in issue number two of my catalog. By confronting Wonder Wart with Elliot Ness, world’s most repressive fascist, I hoped that he would realize that if he wasn’t part of the solution he would be part of the problem. Happily, Wonder Harthog chose to join the age of asparagus and was later seen hanging around with Janis Joplin and smoking dope. He’s semi-retired now putting in an occasional appearance in ZAP. Gilbert has moved in a direction contrary to Kurtzman and Elder, and is currently doing straight rip-offs of newspaper comic strips for the Underground Press sundicate.

Today, comics are not as popular as they used to be. Television stimulates our eyes and ears without our having to move our lips or even turning pages. Newspaper strips which started with the elemental Krazy Kat are now reverting with strips like Peanuts and B.C. Some comic characters from the past are being adapted to the new medium but those characters that aren’t rendered unrecognizable by sleezy animation are stripped of their integrity and are forced to pimp for the forces of conspicuous consumption. Agents of the revolution occasonally try to comabt this growing menace by coopting old characters for their own purposes. Recently vast numbers of Tshirts were sold which bore a picture of the pre-mousketeer version of Mickey Mouse. A generation of kids raised on a watered down version instinctively went for the real stuff. Predictably, Walt Disney Studios put a stop to the shirts and continued to push their new-improved versions.

The most recent comic rip-off of note is the “death of the Road Runner” mystique. Road Runner cartoons, created by chick Jones and produced by Warner Brothers, can be considered to be a parody of all those animal cartoons where the theoretically weaker animal staves off the larger one. The coyote is treated as a tragic figure. The Road Runner himself is of no consequence, while all out attention is focused on the coyote. We identify with him because he attacks the problem of catching the dumb bird in a systematic, logical way. The bird seldom outsmarts the coyote* Instead, he is foiled by fate or his own impatience. Clearly, the final snapper to the Road Runner series would be to have the coyote get the rotten booger. In my youth I heard rumors that the army had a cartoon where the coyote not only catches the Road Runner, but eats him up as well. This cartoon, the rumor continued, was shown only to combat troops the night before they were shipped off to Korea. I don’t know if it was true or not but someone else must have heard about it, because, shortly after Plymouth bought The Road Runner, various Ford guys started painting pictures on their cars that showed the coyote choking him to death. I presume you can buy T-shirts emblazoned with this tender scene at your local drag strip. I got one at mine. Hopefully Warner Brothers won’t be able to halt the production of these fine artifacts the way Disney did the Mickey Mouse shirts. The artistic intent is clearly satirical and that sort of stuff is protected by the law. So don’t mess around Mr. Hollywood Big Shot. Comics belong to the people.