Business envelopes - Publishers

EC Comics - Creepshow Comic Book Club - New York

EC Comics - 1953

Fawcett Publications - 1941

Detective Comics (National - DC Comics) - 1946 War Bonds meter

DC Comics - Superman

Mad Magazine - 1963 I Read Mad meter

Classics Illustrated - 1953

Marvel Comics - c 1987

Marvel No-Prize envelope - 1969

Marvel Production Ltd - 1983

Ray Alma - Alfred E Neuman : Mad Magazine

2015.10.09 New York Comic Con, NYC

One of the special moments of attending NYCC is walking around discovering who might be at the con. Yes there is a program, but I tend not to take the time to go through it, I would rather wander the aisles. When I came to the National Cartoonist Society booth, which had several cartoonists in attendance. 

One of the downsides to wandering around is not knowing some of the artist by sight. Ray Alma was taking his turn at the table so I asks what comic strip he drew. He pointed to his shirt which said "MAD Magazine"...

We discussed his doing a skeetch of Alfred E Neuman, so I chose a Norman Rockwell cover. I liked the comparison of one of America's famous and loved illustrators linked to America's children choice for literature...

When I went to research Ray Alma, I was happy to see the photo on his site mimic the famous Rockwell painting of his self portrait technique..

Ray Alma  is a caricaturist and illustrator. His work has appeared in magazines, newspapers and books. His contributions to Mad Magazine earned him status as one of "The Usual Gang of Idiots".

Alam won the National Cartoonist Society Reuben Award for Best Magazine Illustration - 2009.

Harry North - Mad Magazine

Harry North original art from Mad Magazine #213, 1980... featuring a defunct trading stamp..King Kotton

Harry North an English-born illustrator for Mad Magazine, during the 1970-1990s, as well as Mad Magazine books "The Mad book of Horror Stories, Yeechy Creatures and other neat stuff (writer Lou Silverstone), Mad Tales of School of Hard Yocks (Dick Dibartolo writer), as well as James Bone Shark Bait, Heavy Metal magazine, BEEB Magazine (England)....

"Surplus Items We Can Send to the Arabs"

Artist: Harry North Writer: Tom Koch

Americans are bemoaning the fact that the Arabs are overcharging us of their oil, and then adding insult to injury by bringing the money back here to buy up most of desirable real estate and our most precious art treasures. So MAD asks: Why don't we do something about it? With our famed Yankee ingenuity, we should be able to convince those Middle Eastern oil billionaires that they really ought to spend their US dollars on the very items we'd love to unload. Employing this had sell technique, we could soon get our money back without giving up a single thing that we'd prefer to keep. Mad shows how painlessly we could balance our trade deficit......

Items in the parody article included Our surplus polyester leisure suits, Our perpetual supply of raspberry sherbet, the Philadelphia 76ers, Five million homeless kittens, the greatest tunes of the Johnny Mann singers, North Dakota, Cancelled TV shows, chicken Take-out franchises, Hardy grass seedlings, Spokane's World's Fair site, Outmoded 3-D glasses, Jimmy Connors and Ilie Nastase, Bankrupt stockbrokers equipment, Shameful football letter sweaters, Incompetent TV weathermen, Cyclamate Cola, Merv Griffin, Egg timer glass, Discard Christmas trees and Defunct Trading Stamps.