MONSTER MASHUPS #100

 I've no idea how many monster mashups may be rattling around amid all the MAD imitations launched in the early fifties, but the uncredited creators of the Ajax-Farrell title MADHOUSE visited that particular well at least three times.

First, in "Going, Going, Real Gone" a bunch of spooks (one of whom resembles Peter Lorre) try to get teenaged "bop-kats" (why do I suspect the scripter made that one up of whole cloth?) to stop dancing in their haunted house.

Then in "Emily Ghost Guide to Midnight Manners" the titular advice-giver keeps one fang tucked firmly in cheek as she tries to tell a group of monsters how to scare a honeymoon couple. She shoulda taught them the lyrics to the Time Warp.

And finally, MADHOUSE #4, otherwise a reprint of previous stories, simply reworks an interior, Dali-esque splash from the "Real Gone" story to provide the issue's cover.

NOTE: There was a short-lived musical group called the Bop-Kats, but it was brief and the main guy behind it was born in 1939, so in 1954, the year MADHOUSE #4 was published, he would have been 15 or 16-- not exactly primed to hit the top of any music charts. But it's still more likely that the story's author made up the term on his own. 

Also, I got it backwards, MADHOUSE #4's cover used the interior splash art for the first appearance of "Real Gone" in 1954, and then used some other cover for a reprint misleadingly labeled #2, in 1957.