I’m sitting in a convention room in Columbus, Ohio watching Mark Evanier interview Al Feldstein, and lo and behold, I’m actually getting a signal. So I’m taking a few moments and liveblogging it.
Al is talking about his editorial regime at Mad Magazine, and how it escaped the comics code– followed by how EC might have really got killed, that their distributor (Leader News) went belly-up. They had been publishing rip-offs of EC titles and got clocked by the Code, and the only thing that survived was Mad Magazine. Which ties in with the secret surprises of publishing, and how much stuff lives and dies on secret stuff that most people never ever see or suspect.
Now Mark’s bringing up why Wally Wood chose working with Al Feldstein over Harvey Kurtzman– and it was because Harvey would take forever to send scripts and send checks. Al would always send scripts regularly, and he’d pay people that day. Another useful lesson.
Reminiscing about Mort Drucker, to illustrate old Bob and Ray scripts– which is where Al found Tom Koch, who sent him all sorts of other artists– he had never done caricature work before, and then went on from there to become one of America’s leading caricature artists.
Brief digression from how Mad was sold to Premiere, a textile company, then Lionel, and then eventually DC (which I think at the time was NPP), and how Al got a small chunk of the company, which led to Bill Gaines calling him the highest paid editor in the world.
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Ah, the inevitable Sergio Aragones discussions… whoops, another digression, this time how Al traced Walter Mingo’s famous painting of Alfred E. Neuman to create a black and white piece of clip art that was needed quickly, and the art is still being used today.
UPDATE 12:12: Mark mentions that when he wrote his book Mad Art (I’ll link it later) he was looking for dirt, and that the worst they could find about Al was that he was a bit antisocial. Al said of course, he was busy editing the damn magazine.
UPDATE 12:16: Antonio Prohias, a Cuban political cartoonist in exile (who didn’t speak English and didn’t speak Spanish well either) came in with Spy Vs. Spy and was simply brilliant. Prohias was the second-to-last artist Feldstein hired for a decade (with the exception of Paul Coker Jr. in 1962) until Angelo Torres in 1970. Explains why he called them “the usual gang of idiots”, doesn’t it?
Closing up, now heading off to have lunch with Mark and Mike Gold. I’ll update this with links later.
Final update: Welcome, News From Me readers! Tell Mark I said Howdy.