HUMBUG

The above HAPPY FATHER’S DAY card was included with the purchase I made at Doctor No’s Comic Books in Marietta. The owner, Cliff Biggers, rung up the price, wrapped his latest Comic Shoppe News paper around it with the above card.

Cliff is something of a comic book expert and has created and published comics too. He seems to know the comic industry very well. He knows dates and names.

I asked him about the hardcover reprints of TRUMP and HUMBUG.

He said TRUMP was to be published earlier this year and they backed down. And HUMBUG is scheduled to go to press in September this year. Fantagraphics was to pint both. He said they did a study and found there was not as big of a want for TRUMP as first thought.

TRUMP magazine came out in the mid 50s. It was published by PLAYBOY magazine, which meant it was published by Hugh Hefner. It lasted only two issues before PLAYBOY pulled the plug. The artists and editor was the creator and original artists of MAD comicbook, such as Harvey Kurtzman, Will Elder, Jack Davis, and Wally Wood.

Shortly after TRUMP was de-TRUMPed, the same group, less Wood, started HUMBUG magazine, which lasted 11 issues.

The followers of these artists watched their work in other publications as the years went by. Now, over 50 years later a lot of us would love to see the magazines reprinted into book form as they did the original MAD comics and the EC all the other EC comics. This group we are in, are mostly males in their 60s, but there may be some as old fans as old as 80. At our age, we die in numbers daily…. No wonder the demand is not what they anticipated - and the demand keeps getting smaller.

I said to Cliff Biggers, “They better hurry with HUMBUG, many of us might not wait around.”