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| Copyright DC COMICS |
I must've ordered several back numbers of this particular issue of MAD back in the day. I loved it so much that, whenever I inadvertently dog-eared a corner or creased the spine of my latest copy, I immediately ordered another one. Until the day that THORPE & PORTER informed me that they had run out - no more back numbers of #146 to be had. I eventually managed to buy one from a pen-friend on the Isle of Wight, and that's the one from which I've scanned the following pages.
I remember waxing lyrically and eloquently to one of my school friends about the JAMES BOND parody contained in its pages. "How do you manage to DO all these things?" "Magnificently... of course!" Hell, I'm still using that line today. Whenever I'm showing off to someone by doing a doodle of OOR WULLIE or POPEYE, inevitably I'll be asked: "How do you do that?" And, equally inevitably, I utter my stock reply, stored in my memory banks since 1973. I guess I'm a creature of habit.
Brilliantly drawn by the amazing MORT DRUCKER, this parody has everything. Great art, funny one-liners and James Bond - sorry, Bomb - himself. What's not to love? If you haven't read it before, you're in for a treat - and if you have, you're still in for a treat, albeit one you've experienced before. When this issue first appeared, Bond double-bills still regularly featured in Saturday matinees in cinemas all across the country. It wasn't 'til about 1974 that the Bond movies back-catalogue was sold to television stations, although it was at least another year 'til the first one in the series (Dr. NO) appeared on the box.
Rereading this issue today, I'm pleased to see that it still holds up very well. And who'd ever have thought that typeset lettering for the speech balloons and captions would work so good - better even than hand-crafted ones? They just seemed, against the odds, to suit Mad to a tee - bestowing upon it a literary respectability that normal comicbook lettering probably couldn't have achieved.
Just how did they manage to do it? (C'mon - you must've seen that one coming.) All together now...
"Magnificently... of course!"
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