Joyce Carol Oates reads MAD
It is TRUE, as god is my witness. Time magazine said so.. Writes National Book Award winner Oates:
When I first began reading this inspired comic book, I was quite a young child, entirely lacking in awareness of or interest in who might have been responsible for its freshness and originality amid so much on comic-book racks that was derivative and cliché-ridden. Now I know that Harvey Kurtzman edited Mad magazine and William Gaines published it; that Mad belonged to a controversial family of comic books, EC Comics, one day to be investigated by a Senate committee (on what grounds, one can only speculate); that the fatuously grinning Alfred E. Neuman with his perennial query (”What, me worry?”) prefigured the improbable presidential cartoon character George W. Bush many years later.
07/18/07 at 12:23 pm
Wow that is kind of odd. But it does partially explain how one of her stories was adapted in “Sexy Chix”
07/18/07 at 1:34 pm
I have a few of her gothics around the house - Bellefleur is one - but alas have not yet gotten around to reading longform JCO. Any other reccomendations?
07/19/07 at 10:44 am
I was more pleased to see (in that same TIME article) that Janet Evanovich is really loving Buffy Season 8 from Dark Horse, especially as Evanovich is actually a good writer. (Not much of an Oates fan. You’d think if she read all those MADs, her prose might have a touch of humor somewhere.)