twen issue 1 1963 / selected pages

Dracula comic book / selected pages

Mad mag versus Mad men

Mad magazine years ago ran some wonderful whole page parody ads.  I remember tearing the real thing out of the Saturday Evening Post or Look and keeping them in Mad, I came across these recently and they are still classics.  The best ones had color art by Frank Kelly Freas (below) who did hundreds of cover and inside page illustrations for science fiction magazines.  He had a knack of capturing the feel of the originals which mostly used photos.  

    One thing I liked about the Mad's version was trouble they went to with the typography and product illustrations to make their copies look as near as possible like the originals.  

    No doubt advertisers were well pleased that their campaigns had captured the national mood because even Mad thought it worth producing a satirical version.

You can see some more of these intriguing Renault ads in the February 2012 archive.

This color art was by Frank Frazetta.

 A lovely 224 page, large size paperback about Mad parody ads and nicely it includes the originals, though they are rather smaller than the Mad versions.  Published in 2005, ISBN 0823030814.