Wikipedia:Today's featured article/May 30, 2017

Harvey Kurtzman's Jungle Book is a 1959 graphic novel by American cartoonist Harvey Kurtzman. The satirical stories are aimed at an adult audience, in contrast to Kurtzman's earlier work for adolescents in periodicals such as Mad. The social satire in the book's four stories targets Peter Gunn-style private-detective shows, Westerns such as Gunsmoke, capitalist greed in the publishing industry, Freudian pop psychology, and lynch-hungry yokels in the Deep South. Kurtzman had created the satirical Mad in 1952, but left its publisher EC Comics in 1956 after a dispute over financial control. He proposed Jungle Book as an all-original cartoon book to Ballantine Books to replace their successful series of Mad collections, which had moved to another publisher. Ballantine accepted his proposal, albeit with reservations about its commercial viability. Jungle Book was the first mass-market paperback of original comics published in the United States. Though it was not a financial success, it attracted fans and critical acclaim for its brushwork, satirical adult-oriented humor, experimental dialogue balloons, and adventurous page and panel designs.