Paperback of the week: Mad's Dave Berg Looks at Things

I spent a lot of time reading my brother's Mad magazines growing up and my favorite artist was always Dave Berg, who did "The lighter side of..." comix. Despite the warm-and-fuzzy feelings I have for the venerable publication, however, I almost never buy the Mad mags and paperbacks that I see on my rounds. They haven't increased much in value over the years, for one thing, and god knows if I had wanted them, my hoarder-turned-minimalist brother would've gladly passed on his collection rather than slowly selling them off for small change on half.com. But I don't think I need them in my life; it's enough that my elder daughter has all of his Archie Digests (thankfully, none of the Richie Riches). And at some point I expect I will reach a crossroads with my Ripley's Believe It or Not collection...

That said, when I saw this 1967 Signet edition of Mad's Dave Berg Looks at Things, I couldn't pass it up—my favorite Mad man on my favorite topic? Come on! Sadly, this book doesn't really live up to its glorious cover. There are a few strips devoted to actual things—mostly with regard to the greedy materialism of children and wives, the whole keeping-up-with-the-Joneses compulsion—but the rest tackle more typical Berg-ian subjects (bratty teenagers, surprise parties, office politics, pets, class wars, damn hippies). But the cover totally makes it worth my while. Look at those things! Exactly the retro stuff I scavenge at the sales! The reel-to-reel, the Brownie camera, the soda siphon, the vintage kitchenware—it's like an etsy shoppe exploded all over the poor Dave Berg alter ego. Love it.

Marvelous

I scored these mint-conditon 1976 and 1977 Marvel comics calendars at a great sale in a great neighborhood. I remember there were flash-flood warnings that day but I braved the deluge because the sale was in a long, low brick ranch that I'd driven by millions of times—I had to see what treasure was lying behind its midcentury facade! My fortitude was rewarded: One room had nothing but boxes of pulpy paperbacks and comics, humor books of the ’60s and Mad magazines. That was one hour of glorious sifting. Sigh. Anyway, I knew at a glance that Lindsay must've had these calendars when he was a kid—10 or 11 years old and, I understand, an even bigger comic book geek than he is now. Whoever owned these calendar originally was a similar geek—they are perfect, not a mark on them, not a tear. No one crossed out the days or noted birthdays, god forbid. They were only a quarter apiece so naturally I bought them and when I presented them to Lindsay that evening (I couldn't wait till his birthday), he was, as expected, quite verklempt. He floated down memory lane for a spell, stroking the pristine pages, ogling the amazing artwork and eventually put the calendars on the side table at his end of the couch. Which is where they have remained ever since, in the pile of guitar magazines and cooking magazines.

See, that's the conundrum. What do you do with a calendar once the year is over? Recycle it. Or, if you love it, tear it apart and frame the art? And mar the perfect integrity of the calendar? How could you even think of it, right?? He would never countenance that. We could sell these calendars to some other comic book geek for around 50 bucks a pop and let that guy slip it into an archival box or showcase and pull it out for fondling whenever the mood strikes. Right. That's sooo gonna happen.

Did the French invent Star Wars?

Like most sentient creatures who were born when I was born, I have a certain powerful regard for the Star Wars trilogy. Note I say "trilogy"—I saw the later three "prequels" and consider them...well, abominations would suggest that I'm more of a Star Wars fan than I actually am, but they were lame. Except for the flying Yoda part. And I might have just liked that because I saw the premiere of that film (I don't even know which one it was) at the Ziegfeld in NYC and the audience was just SO INTO IT, that it was hard not to get swept away by the euphoria of the moment. The truth is that when I was 9 or so, I took the very unpopular position that Close Encounters of the Third Kind was better than Star Wars. Even then I liked to be contrary about movies.

Enough disclaimers.

No, wait—one more. I have daughters, not sons, and thus have not been afflicted by any of the Clone Wars/Star Wars cartoon spinoffs and all their expensive Lego incarnations. I don't have to read Star Wars bedtime stories or make beds with Star-Wars-for-Pottery-Barn sheets. Parents of boys could smugly point out that they've been spared the horrors of Disney Princesses, Barbies, Strawberry Shortcake et al—fair enough. But my kids' taste is slightly off the beaten path, so I too have been (mostly) spared from having to read too many Barbie books (one could argue that even one Barbie book is too many but if nothing else, parenthood increases one's tolerance for just about everything).

The point is I have no dog in this fight. If the seeds of Star Wars can be found in some Lefty French comix, I've got no quarrel with that.

L'Empire Des Mille Planetes ("Empire of a Thousand Planets") is the second volume of a French comic book series Valerian and Laureline created by Pierre Christin and Jean-Claude Mezieres. I paid a dollar for this hardback published in 1971 and it seems like kind of a score, a rare edition of a series superpopular among devotees of time-traveling space operas—a series that's also credited with inspiring not only the Star Wars movies (apparently Valerian-reading Frenchies were among the film's designers) but The Fifth Element, Conan the Barbarian and Avatar. The books were published in many languages, including English, but my edition is French and I don't read French so anything I know about this I know from wikipedia (and therefore it is unassailably true). Unfortunately, I neglected to scan the scene most often cited as proof that George Lucas and his French henchmen ripped off the comic, when the Han Solo-ish anti-hero Valerian is encased in plastic during an interrogation, much like studly wiseacre Han Solo gets the carbon treatment at the end of Empire Strikes Back. (If anyone cares, I'll add it later.) But even I can see that the airships look an awful lot like all those, uh, ones in Star Wars, whatever they're called. Anyway, you know an estate sale has done its job if it's raised your awareness of an obscure pop-culture controversy. George Lucas ripped off the French? Mon dieu!