This is my first blog entry, so please forgive any possible screw-ups that may happen. As I've been messing around with this, I've had a few problems with fonts and posting photos and whatnot. Hopefully, I'll get those little issues resolved. Thanks for reading!The Decline of Mad Magazine
I was stoked the other day to find issue 25 of Mad at this amazing bookstore here in San Francisco called Kayo Books, which is an absolute paradise for fans of pulp fiction, old magazines, and obscure printed matter. This is one of those places where you just want to keep searching around because you can almost feel a great discovery just waiting around the corner. There's hardly any organization to all the stacks of comics and magazines (the books are well arranged into categories such as "prostitution, drugs, teenage delinquency, etc.), but if you're willing to put in some time and effort, you'll likely find some cool treasures for a great price. This copy of issue 25 for example, which was the second edition of Mad published in the black and white magazine-size format, ended up costing me around $40. This is not bad at all considering it would likely fall under a rating of VG, which is priced at Mile High Comics (notorious for being over priced) at over $400! But finding this piece of history for a price a poor teacher like me can afford while living in SF is not the point of this post. I wanted to mention how Mad Magazine has been, perhaps, the most significant and influential material item to affect my entire life, and how deeply depressed I've become over the last ten years or so as I have watched it turn into the type of consumer garbage that it often ridiculed during its golden era (which in my book ranges from 1955 to about 1990).
I vividly remember the first time I saw the mischievous smirk of Alfred E. Neuman as a little kid back in the early '70s. I was over my older brother's friend's house, who had the cool '70s boy's bedroom full of Aurora monster models, comic books, Planet of the Apes dolls, and lots of Mad-related stuff. I was so young that I can't remember exactly what was there, but I remember being captivated by Alfred E. in a spellbound manner. Maybe this happened because he was a boy (and kids notice other kids, otherwise I wouldn't never watch a shit TV show like Growing Pains) and he was illustrated and colorful, but it was much more than that; I mean, I never was drawn toward other cartoon depictions in the same way. I flipped through a couple of books (I'm pretty sure I was looking through the little Signet paperbacks and not the actual magazine), but alas I was way too young to appreciate the contents. I couldn't even read at the time, fercrissakes, I was only four years old! It wouldn't be until about 1980 or so, when I was ten, that I would be reacquainted with Mad through a schoolyard friend, and my life would never be the same.
William Gaines once said something like, "Mad isn't just a magazine, it's a way of life." In many ways, Mad was a reaction to the gray suit conformity of the 1950s. Mad, for a large part,was the creation of some punk wise asses who were victims of a paranoid societal censorship that brought down their comic book empire to a near bankrupt status. And they were mostly Jews, whom in the Eisenhower years of church-going suburbanization, were considered maybe one half rung above those godless commies! Even before Mad, when EC was creating god-like titles such as Shock SuspenseStories and Weird Fantasy, the would-be "usual gang of idiots" were slipping in allegories and plain outright mockeries of the hypocrisy and ugliness hidden under the guise of freedom and democracy in post war American society. Take the story "The Patriots" from Shock #2 for example. In this piece, a man at a war parade arouses suspicion when he doesn't take off his hat for the flag. That mistake leads to the realization that his nose looks a bit too big. Soon, the crowd determines the guy's a commie and beats him death. The obligatory twist ending, of course, reveals the man to be a wounded (and blind--hence couldn't see the flag) war veteran coming to the parade to be near his platoon as they marched. Here's a page:
Ah, so nice. And let's not forget that Gaines volunteered to testify before the Senate that horror comics were not the cause of juvenile delinquency, or responsible for the falling apart of good ol' fashion morals, but were mearly good fun. The other publishers didn't stick up for the First Amendment like he did, and in the end he was completely sold out. I heard John Landis (of American Werewolf in London fame) is going to make a movie about Gaines soon. I hope so!
Anyway, I rediscovered Mad when I was about eleven years old or something and I immediately fell into an obsession with every panal and every page. I was fascinated by all of the artists, especially Jack Davis, George Woodbridge, Bob Clarke, and Al Jaffee. I don't know if it's some sort of inherent trait that some of us have or what, but I was immediately tuned into the sarcasm and slight cynicism for society found within the pages. Over the years I would become obsessed with finding back issues to satisfy my need for more. My closest friendship throughout those adolescent days of late childhood/early teens happened because we both realized we were Mad fans. Mad was like how punk music used to be for me back in the day--it was a sign that someone wasn't a complete tool and had a different outlook on life. And I'm not talking about your typical putz who had a couple of issues as a kid and only looked at Spy vs. Spy, I'm talking about true Mad fans. What the hell is with Spy vs. Spy by the way? Everytime I mention how I like Mad to someone, it's almost guaranteed that they will say, "oh yeah, I remember that magazine...Spy vs. Spy, right?" I guess it was the most accessible for the majority of people since it didn't include satirical or esoteric jokes found throughout the rest of the issue. Don Martin's cartoons, though classic, fell under this same category.
Man, I'm just ranting here and still not hitting the subject I wanted to write about--how Mad is practically unreadable now and how most of the original spirit is gone. I could go on and on about this, so I will just end it now by saying that when William Gaines died in the early '90s, the magazine began to slowly die as well. The first major blow happened when Mad began to run ads (ads!!) in their pages. Freakin' advertisements were one of the main targets of Mad's golden years! Gaines and Kurtzman must have been rolling in their graves! If Al Feldstein was still running the show (he retired in 1984), maybe the magazine would still have some integrity. The ads were just the beginning of the decline, a Pandora's Box in a way. Soon, wit and satire was pushed aside for gross and obnoxious, in an attempt to stay relevant with the dumbing down of America. Jack Davis eventually quit because of this. One by one, either because of disgust with the direction things were going, old age, or death, most of the "usual gang of idiots" have left; the magazine had reached the end of a long and wonderful era. There are still a few wonderful writers and artists at Mad, to be sure, but there comes a time when one has to accept that things have changed. With music I went through this a million times, like when 7 SECONDS turned into hippies, or BAD RELIGION signed to Atlantic records, but that's another story!
