Boy, do I like this one. I've seen a lot of great books lately reprinting classic comic books with reproduction worthy of the material…and not to belittle the desirability any others but IDW's "Artist's Edition" of MAD is the best one I've seen. Some of that, of course, is because the material itself is so wonderful — twenty whole stories and a number of covers and loose pages from the comic book issues of MAD, back when it was written and edited by Harvey Kurtzman and drawn by the likes of Wally Wood, Jack Davis and Will Elder. But a lot of the wonderfulness has to do with what IDW and editor Scott Dunbier have done with it.
The big thing they did right was to track down the original art itself and scan directly off it…so you see every erasure, every white-out, every stray pencil marking that didn't get erased. Then they printed the art the size it was drawn. Now, this has its drawbacks because the resultant book is roughly the size of Penn Jillette. It's 15½" by 22¼" and will fit on no shelf in your home or anyone else's. You can't hold the thing in your lap either. You need to open it flat on a table. I'll be storing mine in a wide art drawer I have. That is, when I'm not hauling it out to show everyone who comes by and doesn't have their own yet.
One thing that stands out is that not only does the reproduction live up to the work but the work lives up to the reproduction. Davis, Wood and the others drew this material for dime comics printed on crappy paper and they had no reasonable expectation that it would ever be reprinted once, let alone dozens and dozens of times, eventually full-size and crystal-clear. They could have put a lot less work into the pages and all would have looked fine in what they then thought would be the one and only printing.
They didn't. The panels are loaded with detail and nuance that wasn't visible the first time around — or the second or the third or the ninth. I know these stories real well and I'm seeing things in them I never saw before, not even in Russ Cochran's excellent hardcover reprints. You know how wonderful Wally Wood's art for MAD was? Well, it turns out, it was even better than we thought. Same with Davis, same with Elder, etc. (One minor quibble: John Severin is unrepresented. You may also regret that your particular favorite MAD story didn't make the cut…but there wasn't room for everything and not every story's original art could be located.)
I am similarly impressed with what Harvey Kurtzman did. Years ago, I had the chance to study the original artwork to Marvel's Not Brand Echh #1, which was more or less their attempt to do Kurtzman's MAD. Some very talented people worked on it including Stan Lee and Jack Kirby and even John Severin but the effort fell leagues short of Kurtzman & Company. Looking at the originals, you could see one reason why: Almost every panel had retouches and relettering and patches to indicate they passed it around the office and let everyone take a crack at adding silly signs and gags.
The pages of MAD in this volume show very few examples of relettering or pasteovers or of anyone going through the work after it was completed, trying to make it funnier. Kurtzman was notorious for fussing over pages and redoing his own roughs over and over, spending whole days on one page to make it 1% better. But the stories in IDW's splendid collection have sparse evidence of after-the-fact renovations. The pages really demonstrate that these guys knew what they were doing and did what they wanted to do. I never felt the sheer professionalism so strongly in any other book reprinting great comic art.
The book lists for $150 and it would be a bargain if you paid that. Right this moment, there's one dealer selling it via Amazon for $85.10 and I'll bet that price doesn't last long. I'll further bet that when this book is outta-print, you see copies going on eBay for $300 and up, maybe way up. If this material interests you in the slightest and you can find a place in your home for a copy, don't delay.
In case you can't tell, I kinda liked it.