Number 1992: Nostalgic nostalgia: “Hah! Noon!”

This is the last posting of 2016.

One of the many celebrity deaths we had this past year was Jack Davis, a cartoonist I will always revere. By 1959, when I saw the satire, “Hah! Noon!” in the paperback, The Bedside Mad, Davis’s work already had a magical quality to me, and while I could not always collect everything he did I was always looking for his work.

“Hah! Noon!” is originally from Mad #9 (1954), and is a satire of the classic movie, High Noon (1952), with Gary Cooper and Grace Kelly. I don’t think I actually saw the movie until sometime in the sixties, but I already knew and loved the story based on the Kurtzman/Davis version. That is an ass-backwards way of viewing satire, but that was the way it was with me and Mad paperbacks in the '50s and early '60s.

This is a reprint from The Nostalgic Mad #3, from Mad Super Special #12 (1973). As for the inexorable passage of time, the clock strikes midnight on Saturday night, so goodbye and good riddance to 2016: “I’m a-leavin’!”

Posted in: Pappy Comics