This boy's life
 Before he was adopted by Mad magazine, the "What, Me Worry?" kid appeared on novelty postcards dating back as far as 1890. |
POP ARTISTS Andy Warhol and Roy Lichtenstein weren't the first painters to appreciate the visual style of comics: It seems that Salvador Dali tried his hand at drawing comics as early as 1916, when he was 12. Dali's comics are just one of the revelations in ''Modern Arf: Artists and Models" (Fantagraphics), the first installment in a planned series of books, edited by cartoonist and designer Craig Yoe, that will explore the myriad ways in which high art and lowbrow comic books and strips have overlapped so far. The ''Artists and Models" number, for example, treats us to a wide selection of one-panel gags about artists' models, including a 1954 Picasso sketch of a monkey painting a nude; an eye-popping mini-monograph on the influence of Cubism on Jack Kirby (''The Fantastic Four," ''X-Men," ''Captain America"); and a history of the gap-toothed, red-headed ''What, Me Worry?" kid who, though made famous in the '50s as Alfred E. Neuman, the mascot of Mad magazine, had appeared on novelty postcards since 1890.
''I hate to tell this to The Boston Globe, but The Kid' probably started as a cartoonist's stereotype of an Irish idiot boy," Yoe, an obsessive collector of comics ephemera, says via e-mail from his home in Peekskill, N.Y. And why did he decide to do these books? ''I've always appreciated the sensibilities of taboo-breaking and irreverence that modernist artists bring to their medium," Yoe explains. ''I appreciate it when cartoonists have that kind of attitude, too."
