book by direct rivalry. At the same time, the TV image rendered the sharp and clear photographic image as blur and blear. TV cooled off the ad audience until the continuing vehemence of the ads and entertainment suited the program of the MAD magazine world very well. TV, in fact, turned the previous hot media of photo, film, and radio into a comic-strip world by simply featuring them as overheated packages. Today the ten-year-old clutches his or her MAD ("Build up your Ego with MAD") in the same way that the Russian beatnik treasures an old Presley tape obtained from a G.I. broadcast. If the "Voice of America" suddenly switched to jazz, the Kremlin would have reason to crumble. It would be almost as effective as if the Russian citizens had copies of Sears Roebuck catalogues to goggle at, instead of our dreary propaganda for the American way of life. Picasso has long been a fan of American comics. The highbrow, from Joyce to Picasso, has long been devoted to American popular art because he finds in it an authentic imaginative reaction to official action. Genteel art, on the other hand, tends merely to evade and disapprove of the blatant modes of action in a powerful high definition, or "square," society. Genteel art is a kind of repeat of the specialized acrobatic feats of an industrialized world. Popular art is the clown reminding us of all the life and faculty that we have omitted from our daily routines. He ventures to perform the specialized routines of the society, acting as integral man. But integral man is quite inept in a specialist situation. This, at least, is one way to get at the art of the comics, and the art of the clown. Today our ten-year-olds, in voting for MAD, are telling us in their own way that the TV image has ended the consumer phase of American culture. They are now telling us what the eighteen-year-old beatniks were first trying to say ten years ago. The pictorial consumer age is dead. The iconic age is upon us. We now toss to the Europeans the package that concerned us from 1922 to 1952. They, in turn, enter their first consumer age of