What Me? Now I'm Worried

[Jon]

Ironic that Cracked has a (relatively) successful web presence but Mad magazine has struggled, given that I'm guessing that Mad was always the much more successful print publication.

I went through a quite big Mad phase as a kid. As an Americophile from an early age it was a great place to pick up cultural references from. As WFD has said, most of the stuff they parodied we never got from the UK. I remember first coming across the word 'motherf*$ker' in a Mad movie parody. Wish I could remember what film it was. I have a feeling it was real 70s classic like Taxi Driver or Clockwork Orange.

I sometimes bought the pure US edition but there was also a UK edition, with a mixture of US content and some home-grown stuff too. Just looking at Wikipedia, I'm surprised to learn that there were many other foreign editions, besides the UK one. I also didn't know that they didn't run adverts for such a long time.

Like WOM, I might have owned some of the books too. I definitely had the Mad board game.The objective was to lose all of your money and there was a $1. 329, 063 bill that you could only claim if your name was Alfred E Neuman.

[3 Colours Red]

Cracked.com is owned by Scripps.

That actually had some decent writers at some point. I always enjoyed reading the likes of Gladstone, Swaim, Seanbaby and Soren Bowie. They were pretty much all purged to cut costs. Now it's just a shitty Buzzfeed clone.

[Hot Pepsi]

I looked it up. It died in 2007. Cracked.com is owned by Scripps.

[WOM]

Don't ask me. I could have sworn that Lee Iacocca died about five or six years ago instead of yesterday.

[Hot Pepsi]

I would have bet that it wasn’t being published any more. Is Cracked still in print?

[Walt Flanagans Dog]

My much older brother was big into Mad in the late 70s and early 80s and had a big pile of back issues which I used to pore over. Popular culture wasn't as homogenous then as it is now - they would parody TV series that weren't shown here and movies I would never see (not least as I was far too young) and they'd reference people we'd never heard of, so it all seemed quite exotic (these were of course the days when Jasper Carrott could spin a whole TV series out of Americans being a bit different and words meaning different things over there).

Though if I'd been asked before seeing this thread whether it was still going and had to bet on the outcome I wouldn't have been sure either way, though have seen in it on newsstands over the years and taken some comfort that there was still room for it somewhere.

[WOM]

I'll bet I have a bunch of them somewhere. I remember showing my son, and he looked at me like I had two heads. "Here son....read."

But in one of those 'life imitating Simpsons moments', I remember reading them and thinking "Boy, they're really letting that Spiro Agnew have it..."

[Amor de Cosmos]

A neighbor gave me a box of old, old ones from the '60s when I was about ten, and I couldn't get enough of them.

Do you still have them? Probably worth a bit now.

[Hot Pepsi]

Their subscriber base was down to to 140,000, I read, from a peak of a few million in the 70s.

They recently rebooted it with a new issue #1, something DC has done with a lot of its titles from time to time. Part of that was, apparently, that none of the New York staff were willing to move to the new DC offices in Burbank. Not really sure why it needed to move.

Newsstands don’t really exist now and print just isn’t a winning proposition any more - The Onion stopped doing print issues a few years ago - and the “brand” just wasn’t transitioning to the web, I guess.

[Amor de Cosmos]

It was originally sold in the comic book format but it didn’t meet the Comics Code, so they just turned it into a magazine.

Yeah. We never got the really early issues in the UK. It was about ten years before it showed up, even then they were as rare as hen's teeth for some time. The classic era I mostly know from reprints.

[WOM]

I was just talking to my work mate about this. I went through a three or four year period where I lived for MAD magazine. A neighbor gave me a box of old, old ones from the '60s when I was about ten, and I couldn't get enough of them. Slightly too adult for my age, but not terribly ribald or inappropriate. Adult humor...for kids, I guess. I was sad to read this, although I haven't looked at one in years and actually wonder who even buys them any more.

Books-wise, I had tons...mainly Snappy Answers to Stupid Questions and the like. Horrifying Cliches or Monstrous Cliches or whatever were very good.

[Hot Pepsi]

I used to read it at the dentist.

It was originally sold in the comic book format but it didn’t meet the Comics Code, so they just turned it into a magazine.

[Amor de Cosmos]

Al Jaffee and Will Elder (later to become Mad artists in their school lunch-room New York, 1936

[Amor de Cosmos]

Mad Magazine calls it quits.

I almost ran this on the Death thread but felt it deserved better. So much a part of my life, especially in my early teens. There was nothing like it then, nor since. Truly brilliant, it made me fall in love with magazines, because I realized that comics, which I already loved, could do grown up stuff. It made me love illustration because I'd never seen pictures that looked anything like that before. I remember exactly the first time I saw a copy, at school when I was eleven years old. I knew then that one day I would visit the USA, because this magnificent printed object was just about the most un-British thing I'd ever set eyes on, and I had to understand the place and people that could produce it.

Now it's gone. In truth it should have disappeared at least a couple of decades ago (when it began taking ads for sure.) All great publications tend to outlive their time and Mad was no exception. It was a child of the American fifties, and remains an exceptional window into that time and place. I'll won't miss it, though it's back-issues remain treasures.