“I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, starving hysterical naked… who were burned alive in their innocent flannel suits on Madison Avenue amid blasts of leaden verse and the tanked-up clatter of the iron regiments of fashion and the nitroglycerine shrieks of the fairies of advertising & the mustard gas of sinister intelligent editors, or were run down by the drunken taxicabs of Absolute Reality.” Excerpted from Howl, by Allen Ginsberg.
It appears Mad Magazine is not quite dead yet. Happily, it is showing some signs of regaining health.
Almost immediately after hiring a brilliant new editor, the corporate bean counters decided to pull the rug out from under this great American institution by moving to a virtual all-reprint policy. They still smuggle in a few new pages, and they commission new covers and print off some of their unpublished inventory. I wouldn’t be surprised if, when cleaning out their New York office they discovered an unopened closet containing upwards of a quarter million new Sergio Aragonés pieces. Mad Magazine has had nobody on the masthead listed as “editor” for years.
Lately, we’ve been seeing a minor uptick in the amount of new pages. I scope out Mad each issue because they pick some truly great stuff by their best talent, which is saying quite a lot. The current issue reprints work by Will Elder, Jack Davis, Don Martin, Dick DeBartolo, Mort Drucker, Angelo Torres, Al Jaffee, Harvey Kurtzman… you know, “the usual gang of idiots.”
Among the new material in this Frankenstein-themed issue is a full-color four-pager written and drawn by Desmond Devlin and Tom Richmond, who were Mad’s last long-lived parody team back in better times. They filled in whatever time they had producing an exceptionally worthy book called Claptrap, which featured parodies of classic movies done in the style that so many Mad imitators failed to match.
This story is called “The Horror of Quack-Enstein” and the villain in the piece is Robert F. Kennedy, The Sequel, the man so pathetically and aggressively stupid that in his short time in office he already is responsible for the deaths of thousands — soon millions — of people around the world, many in the United States of America. RFK2 is the man who answers the question “What if Doctor Doom were given massive power but no brains whatsoever?” This explains why the bastard collects road kill.
The story, which just as easily could have been titled “Just Desserts,” is Mad Magazine at its best — and that, my friends, is a very high bar.
With Warner Bros. and its DC Comics divisions ownership changing hands almost as frequently as President Trump changes his mind, I hesitate to predict Mad’s future. Clearly, its trademark maintains value, and it is part of America’s cultural terra firma, but, then again, so are The Lone Ranger and MGM. Paramount and its new far-right wing ownership are trying to buy the place, evidently to put CNN and Anderson Cooper in their place.
Mad Magazine came about during very, very dark times. The nation had lost its mind over a highly exaggerated, some might suggest trumped-up, threat of a communist takeover. The comic book haters had Fredric Wertham and his many, many fellow travelers stoking bonfires that burned so many great magazines these fools made pre-Code comics — such as EC, which gave us Mad — exceptionally valuable decades before slabbing turned the hobby into a joke.
All this led to an endless sea of go-for-the-throat comedic social commentary that Mad’s traditional teen audience gobbled up like a hound dog’s last meal. Mad preceded and influenced such social evils as Rocky and Bullwinkle, The Simpsons, Beavis and Butthead, Monty Python’s Flying Circus, South Park, Saturday Night Live, SCTV, Family Man… and Mad TV. If a magazine could be named in paternity suits, Mad would have had to hire a whole lot more lawyers.
I’m quite happy to see Mad take a shot at reviving their notoriety and bringing it into the 21st century. I’m quite familiar with the economics of magazine publishing — bottom line, there aren’t any — and I think the odds on returning to those same exact thrilling days of yesteryear are not in the cards. But we have other media that has served those needs, and Mad can be a valuable brand name in those arenas.
Assuming you think this internet thing is going to work.
