Okay, Go Ahead. Worry.

I should've known this was going to end badly, when I saw a link earlier this week to a Smithsonian Magazine piece lauding MAD Magazine. The article was from last year, more or less at the time of MAD's "reboot" (April 2018 was Issue No. 1), heralding how all the satire and bathroom humor was a genuine and much-needed effort to question authority and the credibility of those in charge; While newscasters regularly parroted questionable government claims, Mad was calling politicians liars when they lied.

Now, though? Less so, maybe on the way to not so at all:  DC Comics, into which MAD was folded in at some point when I wasn't looking, announced this week that the publication would be coming off newstands after next month's issue and essentially abandoning all new content except for year-end annuals. DC, and/or its higher-up owners at Time Warner/ATT/ Whoever They Are This Month, had dropped earlier death knells on the traditions of the publication, first by returning advertising to its pages in 2001 and then moving it from its heart and home in Manhattan to Beautiful Downtown Burbank back in 2017.

It was little known (although I did at the time) that MAD was corporate owned since the 60s, when founding publisher Bill Gaines sold EC Publications to a Warner Communications predecessor company, but the MAD I knew was given free rein to take on anybody and everything. They did it in such a subversive and snarky way, most of their targets didn't see the bullet coming until after it had been implanted in their attitudes.  I was a longtime subscriber, thanks to my ridiculously Republican godparents; all they knew was that their three boys thought the magazine was funny, so when I had a near-fatal accident a few months before my 14th birthday, they gifted me a subscription that came more or less every month all the way into my freshman year of college.

For all its counterculturalness, the format was pretty tight: virtually every issue opened with a movie parody and ended with a TV one. Some of these proved to be more memorable than the actual films or shows being spoofed. Who remembers George C. Scott in The New Centurions? Probably only me, and that, surely, just because they did a riff on it as The New Comedians.



In between were the regulars: Dave Berg's "lighter side," who made Roger Kaputnik a household name; "Spy Vs. Spy," by Antonio Prohias, usually one page of cold war comedy back when our government actually resisted being run by the Russians; Don Martin's square-faced characters getting into assorted bits of trouble; occasional "primers" on weird things like the rules of bowling and hockey; and perhaps the MADdest spirit of them all, the legendary Al Jaffee. He closed every issue with those Fold-In pages, and came up with some of the most thorough and loving stabs at so much of modern America-updating baseball to basebrawl, pointing out planned obsolescence in products (I can only imagine him taking down a microwave lasting fewer than five years:P), and a regular feature of both of our jobs to this day, Snappy Answers to Stupid Questions!

I feel that I must seek out and save that final issue when it arrives, if it hasn't already.  Many of the original cast have long passed, including Berg, Martin, longtime editor Al Feldstein, and, just last year, his successor Nick Meglin.  We sent a copy of our high school literary magazine (which had quite a bit of graphic art content) to 485 MADison Avenue, and Nick was kind enough to write back and compliment us on the relative quality of our comic work compared to other "freshman fits" that got sent in.  But last I knew, Jaffee was still phoning, if not folding, them in; and Arnie Kogen, Frank Jacobs and Dick DeBartolo are at least Not Currently Dead.

I will always be proud to have been influenced by that Usual Gang of Idiots:)