GUEST POST BY BARRY PEARL - IT'S A MAD, MAD WORLD... OR IS IT?

The very first issue.  Copyright relevant owner

Here we are again with a guest post by Bashful BARRY PEARL.  I think Barry has decided to take over the world, and he's started with my blog, but let's face it - it needs all the help it can get.  Take it away, Barry.

******

The U.S. version of Mad Magazine stopped publishing this year as a result of continually-declining sales.  I believe this was because it had become the same as what it was originally satirizing: formulistic, industrialized, predictable, repetitive and, frankly, unoriginal.  I learned from the Kid that the British version, which reprinted much of the American material, was discontinued in 1994.

A UK edition from the early 1970s

If all the people who complained about Mad's passing had still bought the damn magazine, it would still be in business.  As most people will know, it started life as a colour comic book and stayed that way for 23 issues.  With #24, it became a (mainly) b&w magazine, but contrary to popular belief, the change was not to escape the scrutiny of the newly formed Comics Code - that was just a happy bonus.  The real reason was because publisher M.C. Gaines wanted to keep editor Harvey Kurtzman from jumping ship to somewhere else, and since Kurtzman had always wanted to work on the 'slicks' (as they were known), Gaines turned Mad into a mag in order to keep him on board.  

Mad first appeared in 1952, and with Harvey Kurtzman's vision, satirized the popular culture medium it was in.  Comics, movies, TV shows and magazines.  These features still hold up today, they are damn funny!  A year after Mad metamorphosed into a magazine (1955), Kurtzman left and Al Feldstein became editor. He expanded the world of Mad and it became a periodical aimed not just at children, but also young adults.  In growing the circulation to over two million copies, Feldstein became a "non-conformist" in an American society that was preaching conformity.  Honest, this was a big deal then.  Kids were wearing different clothes, listening to different music, and had different styles and lengths of hair than their parents.  And, with the Viet Nam war waging they were developing different values and different views about patriotism.

I cannot name all the magazines that Mad cloned, but among them were Crazy, Snafu, Spoof, Cracked, Sick, Lunatickle, Cockeyed, Thimk, Frenzy, Frantic, Loco, Panic, and Zany.  The list, in America, of all the TV shows and comedians it influenced would also be long.

But Creativity and humour come from individuals, not corporations.  Mad became a property under a chain of ownership and supervision starting in the early 1960s:   The Kinney Corporation, Warner Brothers, then DC Comics, then Time Warner, then AOL Time Warner, and now AT&T.  At first Mad was left alone, but after Feldstein and Gaines departed, it became more and more corporate.  And predictable and boring in the early 1970s

I think Mad wanted to remain "G" rated, available for kids, so its audience, as it grew older, waned.  In 1970, National Lampoon, temporarily, took its place.  But satire needs to be current, and Lampoon soon faded away.  (Lampoon radically changed in 1975 when its creators left and companies took over… not to produce magazines but other properties such as movies.  But that's another blog.)

But National Lampoon got one thing current, they saw the diminishing reach of Mad Magazine and produced a wonderful, funny and accurate satire of Mad.  It’s from 1972 and the cover is by John Romita, most famous for Spider-Man!

Posted in: Cartoons