Gilliamesque. Terry Gilliam

      BABE PRESLEY – that’s old Elvis, in an early drawing from my high school magazine. You can see how much care I’ve taken over the signature. You get the signature right and everything else follows – that’s how it worked for Picasso, too. I’ve been lucky to be exactly the right age at the right time at several different points in my life, and 1956 was definitely a good year to be sixteen (just as ten years later, being a bit older than most of the first generation of hippies probably helped stop me getting as badly fucked up as some of my friends did). I remember sitting in a parked car outside my high school when ‘Heartbreak Hotel’ came on the radio and thinking ‘Shit! I’ve never heard anything like that before.’ But there was no danger of me trying to follow in Elvis’ blue suede footsteps. I played the French horn in the school band and openings were few and far between for people lumbering around wrapped in one of those at Sun Records. I didn’t care, though. I loved the way the sound of that instrument came from another space, and I was good at dancing, so the benefits of the rock ’n’ roll era were not completely denied to me in an out-of-school context.

      Looking back, there were some similarities with Python, in that Mad could be very intelligent and unbelievably silly at the same time, and this was obviously a mixture I liked. Its highest purpose was to entertain, but if you could have fun while saying something important at the same time, then so much the better.

      The first lesson I learned from Mad comics was that one of the most effective ways of making a comedic point is to take a well-known character with certain widely accepted attributes, and then turn them on their head or use them in illicit ways. Whether that meant subverting a pre-existing comic strip or TV show or – because Mad mainstay Harvey Kurtzman loved movies so much – using familiar faces or storylines from the cinema as grist to the mill of political satire (Humphrey Bogart’s Captain Queeg in The Caine Mutiny was a < particular favourite), I found the audacity of it breathtaking and hilarious.

      The other key thing about Mad comics, apart from the boldness of its parodies and appropriations, was that it was beautifully drawn. The penman ship of Jack Davis was so amazing that I just had to try to copy it – that was how I schooled myself as a draftsman, not with Rembrandt but with Jack Davis: looking at the effects he’d achieved and trying to work out how he’d done it by having a go myself. All the main Mad artists brought something different to the table – Willy Elder was the gag-master. Harvey would write a basic storyline and then Willy would add all these little accretions of humorous detail (which he called ‘chicken fat’), so you could go back to his work time and time again and keep finding new things in it. Years later, Elder’s drawings would end up being maybe the biggest single influence on how I’d make movies – inspiring me to try to fill up each shot with so much detail that it would repay second, third and even fourth viewings.

       Harvey Kurtzman’s magazines were, in a sense, movies without movement. I learned from Mad and Help! how to do zooms, tracking shots, close-ups – all the grammar of film.

      Last but not least among the building blocks of Mad comics’ irresistible allure was the unabashed sensuality of Wally Wood’s female characters, which were so unbearably sexy that they almost felt like pornography. As a precautionary acknowledgement of the vague sense of impropriety associated with the publication, I used to hide my Mad comics in the garage. On one unfortunate occasion they were discovered, and I got a whipping with a belt for my pleasures, but if that was meant to be aversion therapy, it didn’t work, probably because the leathery strictures were applied by my dad, who didn’t think it was entirely justified and was just doing my mother’s dirty work for her.

      It wasn’t that I didn’t take anything seriously when I was growing up. On the contrary, I was so intensely engaged with all the things that did interest me that it sometimes made me oblivious to salient facts about my broader situation. In some ways, this inner directedness was a good thing – it meant other kids found me quite easy to be around, because I had no issues, and basically inhabited my own private world, which at least made sense to me. But it could also lead to unwelcome surprises, when my naive vision of the world came into conflict with reality.

      For many people, such a conflict might have manifested itself in the form of unexpected public humiliation at the hands of malevolently inclined schoolmates. For me, it was more likely to involve having the mantle of unsought social responsibility thrust upon me. At the tender age of fourteen, just a couple of years after my arrival at Chase Street Elementary School in Panorama City, I found myself giving the school’s graduation address on the subject of ‘Mexico’, a topic about which I knew extraordinarily little. Later on at Birmingham High School – which was one of the largest in LA, with more than 2,000 students in an old army hospital that had been converted into classrooms after the war – one of the most painfully embarrassing moments in my educational career would see me elected king of the senior prom, in preference to my infinitely better-qualified best friend Steve Gellar, who just happened to be Jewish.

      Before we can dip a nervous toe into that particular WASP-plagued swimming pool, the particular chronology of my personal odyssey from teenage paragon of civic virtue to subversive cartoonist-in-waiting requires a digression into scouting. Being a boy scout was great fun because it took me out into nature, and you had to work as a group and learn new skills – two activities I still enjoy to this day. The Morse code I don’t use so much, but I can still do knot tying, and if I was trapped in a well with a broken arm, I could probably tie a bowline around myself with just the other arm to pull myself out, which is a reassuring ability to have.

      Scout meetings were once a week, but every now and then they’d take us on these amazing camping trips up in the mountains. That’s what’s wonderful about LA – how close the San Bernardino mountains are. We’d go up there for the weekend and sit around the campfire at night, where tales would be told – all these things which are so primal, and which I’ve never quite grown out of. (Luckily I went into showbiz, so I’ve never had to.)

       Even at one with nature in the wilds as we were, Hollywood’s magic Kingdom still cast a long shadow.

       Among the stars who came out to dazzle us in the light-pollution-free skies of Irvine Ranch were several – Danny Kaye and Debbie Reynolds among them – who I’d later get to know via friendships with their diversely talented offspring. If you’d broken this big news to the thirteen-year-old me, I would’ve found it immensely unlikely.

       The most spectacular of these outward-bound excursions was the 1953 National Scouts Jamboree at Irvine Ranch in southern California. It’s probably all identical tract homes now, but then it was a huge temporary hormonal metropolis of 45,000 teenage boys in shorts.

       We stayed there for a whole week – it was our Kumbh Mela – and hopefully these extracts from the beautifully designed official souvenir brochure (design standards were stratospheric in 1950s America, as the pristine layouts of my high school yearbooks will also attest) give you some sense of the mood of this infectiously purposeful corralling of youthful vitality.

      As if to suggest that there might be some truth in the old adage that ‘politics is show-business for ugly people’, another distinguished visitor – vice president Richard Nixon – also dropped by to briefly rejoin his old troop. ‘The Veep squatted on his haunches [it says here] and whipped up one of the 44,000 best patrol pancake breakfasts eaten on the Irvine Ranch that morning.’ Pity the 1,000