Sergio Aragones:  MAD's Greatest Artists
                                             (2010 - Running Press)  

     [-BELOW THE LINE-]   Subtitled "Five Decades Of His Finest Works".  Only by this website's idiosyncratic criteria is this book not going to score well.  It is a huge collection of Aragones' work for MAD magazine, but even though you could imagine his huge body of single panel gag-drawings, there aren't enough such pages to get this tome up on to The List.  Out of this 272-page book, only 55 of them focus on non-sequential art (23 with large reproductions and 32 with multiple drawings).  Almost any collection of his work is going breakdown the same way, but I think I have a couple of his MAD paperbacks that were dedicated to his single-image gags.  Patrick McDonnell wrote the foreward and got his own well-presented homage to Aragones' 'The Shadow Knows' series.  Also, as a parent, I want to observe that among the many jokes & gags are a couple that are not suitable for a pre-teen, not to mention there being humor from decades ago that could no longer pass the PC test (not that that was ever a goal of MAD magazine. . .).  I mean, I know most humor has to make fun of somebody, but the sensitivity training we've now been subject to for years can make it uncomfortable to see the target be stereotypically represented gay or obese people.



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