MY first issue was the one with Alfred E. Neuman opening the jack-in-the-box, which screams at him. The teevee parody was “Bats-Man.” I believe it was September, 1966, and I was five years old.
Read it religiously through the Nixon years, and quit about the time Nixon quit…I’d discovered the National Lampoon at that point, which had naked ladies in it.
Mad started to suck when I grew out of it.
I’d bet if you looked at your life about when you think it started to suck you’d note a similar pattern.
Just IMO, though.
I disagree. I literally grew up on Mad–born in 1977, I spent my early reading years going through my mom’s 10-year stack of MAD magazines. Any sense of humor I’ve developed was formed then: I learned about the fallacies of government, parents, and popular entertainment.
Anyway, even at 5 I knew the old magazins were hilarious. And by 11 or 12 or so, I knew the magazine had started to suck. But the old ones are still funny, I think.
Some of the Millennium-oriented stuff was funny.
One of the problems with MAD now is that you pick up an issue and you see the same things that you saw as a kid. Literally the same thing. They’d just lift a comic that was written 10, 20, or 40 years ago and use it as if it were hot off the presses. Hey, kids today won’t notice, right? But some people do notice, and it’s a shame they can’t fill their magazines with original material. And besides, slamming Olivia Newton John doesn’t quite have the same effect when the kids start scratching their heads and saying “who’s Olivia Newton John?”
And for those of you who say “I haven’t picked up a MAD magazine in 5 years but man, those ads sure piss me off.” Let me just slap you all with a clue by four and explain to you how the business world works.
Funny how the magazine went forty, damn near fifty years without ads. Care to explain to me again how the business world works? Or better yet, to the current gang of idiots? They don’t seem to know how to do that anymore.
Yes, here’s how the business world works: money comes in or business goes out.
Those of you that aren’t contributing to MAD’s bottom line have no right to complain about how they go about making money. I’m sure they’re not putting ads in there for the sole purpose of pissing people off. They’re doing it to actually stay in business because, obviously, enough people aren’t buying the magazine right now to keep it afloat.
Now, you can come back with “so maybe they can make the magainzine better and THEN people would buy it.” Fair enough. But there’s no guarantee that better magazine=increased sales in the short run and I’m sure they need money now.
IMO, Tengu is right. The MAD fad in my neighborhood went downhill when we started going off the college (early 80’s). We were huge MAD junkies - bought every issue, had every paperback. I must have read The Mad World of William M. Gaines a hundred times. But, the artists started changing, and it just wasn’t funny anymore.
Don’t forget the new “airbrushed” Spy vs. Spy, ack!
I haven’t picked up a copy since the early 80s, but I remember not liking it much then. With a few notable exceptions such as the Sergio Aragones stuff, and the little weird cartoons in the margins, I found Mad ugly and unfunny. Sorry.
I bought the recent MAD XL’s (#'s 1-6) specifically to read the serialization of The Mad World of William M. Gaines. Genius.
The mag went downhill when he died, but it would have started to go downhill eventually, anyway. The classic artists were gonna die. Prohias hadn’t drawn Spy vs. Spy since 1991 (possibly earlier. Bob Clarke was the first substitute artist), and the cold war was winding down. Don Martin moved over to Cracked. Is Dave Berg not drawing “Lighter Side” anymore? The last issue I saw (c. Oct 2000) still looked like he was drawing it. (You can tell by the clothes the figures are wearing).
Anyway, the core of artists/buddies that made Mad great for so many years was gonna dissolve. And without Gaines to spearhead a new coalition, it was just going to become a mishmash of people doing their own thing. There is some talent in the current issues (Des Devlin comes to mind), but the top editor isn’t hunting it down and paying the big bucks for the work anymore, and there certainly aren’t the trips by contemporaries to exotic, far-flung locales. (Insert aol-time warner bashing here, it’s sort of germaine).
It was Mad in he 60’s, Lampoon in the 70’s, Spy in the 80’s and Onion in the 90’s (approximately), and in a couple of your the Onion is gonna dry up (The move to New York will not be what kills them, although it won’t help matters much. I haven’t noticed any drop in quality yet, although the quantity seems to have waned). I’d guess that Modern Humorist will rise up in the Naughty Aughties, but that remains to be seen.
Magazine Publishing is a hard business, and distributor conglomeration hasn’t made it any easier. (I can’t find ENTERTAINMENT WEEKLY at most of the newsstands here in Owatonna, MN, for gosh sakes.)
blink What the hell does that have to do with anything?
Summary: Mad died when Gaines died, but the corpse hasn’t started to really smell bad until recently.
-Myron
Yeah, what’s going on at the Onion? It’s like they publish 2-3 issues, then take a 3-4 week break. Are they putting out another book or something? Or just getting lazy?
Pardon the hijack…
I haven’t read it for ages. A few months ago I went through a copy at the newsstand just for the heck of it, and discovered to my dismay that the ‘The Lighter Side Of’ feature was reused from the seventies or sixties. I could tell by the clothes. The rest of the magazine didn’t seem all that funny either.
And I haven’t stopped liking subversive humour either. There’s just as many targets now as thirty or forty years ago. 
Maybe The Man Who, ElvisL1ves and astorian are right. MAD dropped the ball in the early nineties, just in time for the Simpsons to pick it up…
It’s tough to date Berg’s Lighter Side. His pieces
from the 80’s, still used clothes from the 60’s and 70’s.
Slightly off topic-Were the spies in Spy Vs Spy supposed to be the same two resurrected characters ala Itchy and Scratchy? I’ve begun to think that Prohias intended that after any spy’s death, he is replaced by another indistinguishable drone.
Good call. The Simpsons may have been the benchmark of humor for the 90’s, with the Onion serving for the “Turn of the millennium.”
I am one of those who believe that the quality of the Simpsons is not as good as it used to be, owing mainly to the fact that’s it’s different writers now.
But that’s another (well worn) thread, of course.
-Myron