So, MAD Magazine’s having its last rites read.
There’ve been a lot of spilt Tweets, a lot of gnashed teeth, a lot of think-pieces awkwardly crowbarring in a “What, Me Worry?”.
Honestly, though - when was the last time anyone actually bought it?
Maybe we should have seen the writing on the wall when Trump, whose pop cultural memory surely climaxed in 1988, bestowed Dem presidential candidate Pete Buttigieg with the nickname ‘Alred E. Neuman’.
Ominously, Buttigieg, 38, professed to have fuck all idea who that was.
And that’s fair enough, considering MAD magazine – the dorky mascot’s home – has barely rated a blip on the pop cultural radar since the days of LA Law.
It was announced last week that the once influential satire mag, now a quarterly, would be consigned to pumping out reprints until the end of the subscription cycle, when the masthead would probably be taken out behind the shed and finally put out of its misery.
I picked up the reboot a year ago out of morbid interest.It was grossly expensive and utterly devoid of laughs, mostly consisting of softballs for Trump and reheated Spy V Spy japes.
The Trump era offers plenty of chum for a satire mag with ‘nads, but instead we were offered up toothless, reheated staples with a coat of 21st century kitchen sink graphic design, wallowing in the kid glove pop culture skewerings MAD has leant on since I was a kid,
It’s an ignominious, wet fart ending for the iconic satire rag, which was birthed out of EC Comics by the iconic Bill Gaines and Harvey Kurtzman as a counterpoint to the square and paranoid fifties.
The ‘usual gang of idiots’ that made up the magazine’s golden era included master cartoonists like Jack Davis (below), Wally Wood, Al Jaffee, Sergio Aragones and on and on. Even as the harder edges were shorn off, names like Mort Drucker, Angelo Torres, Don Martin and Sam Viviano resonate.
Maybe not Duck Edwing though, he shat me up the adolescent wall.
(There were obviously a crack stable of writers, too, but the only one that springs immediately to mind is Dick DeBartolo and his endless movie parodies. Many of the artists did their finest work writing for themselves, too.)
Go back and read the slender paperback collections and marvel at the razor sharp bite of the mag’s first golden decades, a wild, nervy outlaw spirit lasted into the late ‘70s. They were transgressive, occasionally nasty and ugly, often tasteless.
MAD was a masthead that felt dangerous, countercultural on a par with Rolling Stone or Esquire at the time.
The death knell surely sounded when MAD detached from the zeitgeist and kept rehashing the 17 greatest hits, while reviled pretenders like Cracked evolved and adapted to the accelerating times.
I gave up on MAD as I exited my mid-teens and got into “grown up” comics, but the irreverent sensibility’s always stuck with me. Home Brewed contains a healthy dose of the snickering, knowing asides of MAD at its best, I hope.Let’s be honest - the Aussie version, which rudely replaced the OG Yank version on newsstands in the late ‘80s was unreadable dreck - especially considering the available talent in this country. An embarrassment.
In an ideal world, MAD would eventually be rebooted and overseen by the transgressive, contemporary descendants of Gaines, Kurtzman, Wood and so on.
Cartoonist Matt Bors made the offer on Twitter, and the prospect of a rebirth with angry, relevant creators like Eli Valley, Lisa Czech and Johnny Ryan at the helm is a compelling one.
So, yeah.
While we need you in the here and now, MAD, you just aren’t cut out for it in your present form.
Evolve or die.
Vale.