kurtzman

Scooters Say Self-Propelled Locomotion Is For Suckers

Scooters Say Self-Propelled Locomotion Is For Suckers

In the second issue of Harvey Kurtzman’s Mad (before the Comics Code hit and it ostensibly became a “magazine”. You know, like Cracked or The New Yorker), Wally Wood illustrated a story called “Blobs”. In it, gelid human midgets flew their flying robot scooters around a futuristic Fritz Lang cityscape without the slightest use of the flaccid appendages of their arms and legs. They had been made superfluous by the forward progress of science. The eponymous human blobs also wore gigantic vacuum-tube computers on their heads that spoke their thoughts aloud in a capital letter robot font, and by merely pumping a quarter into a vending machine, they could make out with a Rita Hayworth titanium robot.