[Groop] A review of "MAD's Greatest Artists: Sergio Aragones: Five Decades of His Finest Works"

01kipper at gmail.com 01kipper at gmail.com
Mon Oct 25 13:32:52 PDT 2010


Here is a copy of the review I posted to "Amazon.ca":


  True to its title, this is a collection of Sergio's artwork from MAD
magazine, ranging from the '60s to the current day. In addition, there are
marginals scattered throughout on every page, a detail I very much enjoyed.
It is wonderfully oversized, and printed on good quality heavy paper.


Most of the stuff from the '60s and '70s has been published in book format
before (such as in "MAD's Sergio Aragones on Parade"), but not on such good
quality paper as the current offering. The former title is also long out of
print.


Included are some MAD articles where Sergio was not the writer and merely
did the artwork. These I did not enjoy as much as the pieces which were 100%
Sergio, but thankfully the former are in the minority. There are also
reprints of some covers Sergio did, including the cover of the awesome MAD
MANIA Super Special (Spring 1988).


If I had one complaint it would be to do with the editing of the marginals
which appear on each page. It would have been nice if there were
era-appropriate marginals in each section (ie, marginals Sergio wrote in the
'60s appearing in the '60s section). An especially glaring example (to my
eye) is in the '60s section there is a marginal showing a man rushing past
his wife to check his computer email! But perhaps this is more a matter of
personal taste. On a more egregious note, one marginal appears twice (p.37
and p.50), and another appears three times (p.110, p.123, p.136)! Two other
marginals were also erroneously duplicated, but in this case they were
actually printed on one of Sergio's pieces, obstructing the artwork (p.146,
upper left panel).


Overall though, that is a very minor complaint. This is a fantastic book and
very easily worth the price.
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