User:Potter Zebby/sandbox/Max Brandel

Max Brandel

Max Brandel (November 10, 1910 - September 26, 1975) was a Ukranian-born illustrator and designer who is best known for his work in Mad Magazine, for whom he contributed more than 75 articles in the decade from 1966 until his death. Longtime editor John Ficarra called Brandel "one of the unsung heroes of Mad."

He was a successful caricaturist, drawing for publications across the continent including as the Swiss L'lllustre, Afrique Magazine and Belgium's Pourquoi Pas. During World War 2, Brandel was held prisoner in Tittmoning Castle in Bavaria. Brandel had managed to obtain a Costa Rican passport, which insulated him from the harsher internment imposed on many European Jews. Brandel entertained his fellow prisoners, including the African-American wrestler Reggie Siki, by drawing caricatures of them. In 2016, those drawings were exhibited at the Museum of Jewish Heritage.

After the war, Brandel and his wife Lottie moved to Paris for three years before emigrating to New York City, which Brandel found somewhat disorienting. "New York makes Paris seem like a province," he told King Features columnist Mel Heimer in 1949. "There is no comparison. They told me before I came about the size of New York, but it is one of those things that cannot be told."

He provided illustrations for the leftist newspaper PM Screen Stories Horizon

In 2016, his daughter Eve told the New York Times "He never talked about the past-- zero."

"conceived by" credit

Word Power (1973) Mad Jumble Book ???

"Ten Commandments Revisited"-- pg 216

And perhaps one of the best behind-the-scenes stories comes from Annie Gaines. She was a Penn State student in the late ‘60s when she needed a reprint of a MAD piece for a class project. The captioned-snapshot article, titled “America, the Beautiful — Revisited,” took the nation to task for its pitiful ecological politics; it was humorously conceived by Jacobs and produced by Max Brandel. (”Brandel was one of the unsung heroes of MAD,” Ficarra says, “the way he was juxtaposing photos and content.”) So the Penn State student wrote MAD Publisher William M. Gaines for a reprint (which he sent), an ongoing correspondence began and, within a few years later — from that satiric root of polluted-Earth humor — their love bloomed. Annie became Bill’s third wife, as they embarked for decades, she writes, upon “a long whirlwind adventure... .”