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So a few decades back, I started to participate in the local computer bulletin board (or BBS) scene. This is what we had before general qccess to the internet, and an alternative to larger commercial enterprises like Prodigy, Compuserve, and AOL. Hobbyists would set up BBS software on their own computers, and with a dedicated phone line or two allow users to dial in with their own computers and modems to participate in message boards, play games, download the “warez,” what have you.
It was a fun activity and a creative outlet, and on at least one of these BBSes I ran a dedicated section for comics discussion. This was very early in my comics retail career (or “career”) and several folks on these BBSes were, in fact, customers of mine. It was usually a fun, friendly endeavor and I’m still friends with a number of people from then to this day.
And I say “usually” because there was this one guy — isn’t there always — who was a real fly in the ointment. Going by the appropriate name of “Bozo” (appropriate not in the Larry Harmon way, but in the more derogatory sense), this person would rant and cajole and insult with misspelled screeds and usually unwarranted venom. Hostile and homophobic, it was a wonder to me why he spent his time doing this in paces where folks were just trying to have a little fun and relax. (It was also a wonder to me, in retrospect, why he wasn’t immediately kicked off these BBSes…perhaps he was from some, but he certainly seemed to be around a lot.) I tangled with him once or twice, and quickly realized both the futility of this and that this was exactly what he wanted, so I stopped.
This outsized toxic personality had me wondering…just who was this guy? And it wasn’t like today, where some jerk can pop up out of nowhere and he’s, like, on the other side of the world from you. This was probably someone at least relatively nearby, calling into the boards to wreak his havoc. I pictured some cranky dude in his 40s (I was in my 20s at the time) in his stained t-shirt banging at his keyboard surrounded by empty cans of whatever his poison of choice may have been, smoker’s-cough laughing at his latest bon mots.
One thing about these being local BBSes is that there would occasionally be in-person gatherings, at a park or bowling alley or places like that, where we meet face-to-face instead of just typing words at each other. And it was at one of these gatherings that “Bozo” turned up.
And what surprised me was that…he was about my age, possibly younger. A handsome guy, appeared to be completely congenial in person, even perhaps a little sheepish to stand revealed as “that guy.” Though I was a relative newcomer to the BBS scene compared to many of the others at these gathering, and they seemed to be familiar if not friendly with the fella. As if it were necessary to have a “troll” on the BBSes and this was they guy who happened to take up the job, and, y’know, no hard feelings.
I never did get any actual insight into what “Bozo” thought he was doing, whether this was some form of extended performance art or if he actually bought into all the madness he was spouting. Anyway, it didn’t matter because by the mid-late-ish ’90s the local BBS scene had largely collapse, as the internet began to expand access and lured users away. And “Bozo” because an artifact of the past, a weird memory from a mostly positive pastime.
But then I was on the internet, where there were plenty more “Bozos” to be had.
I was not a Usenet guy, the message exchange system that primarily dominated early internet usage before the advent of the World Wide Web, but yes, I know trolling was a problem there too. And of course there were all the dedicated message boards on the Web, with their own problematic trolls, but I mostly avoided those as well. But I didn’t really peronally encounter trolling again until blogs began to really be a thing. Especially after I started my own blog.
To be fair, I haven’t had to deal with many over the couple of decades of doing this site. There are the occasional drive-by commenters, who only turn up once to say something insulting to me because they disagreed with whatever. I had a couple of recurring trolls (one of which followed me over from the old Fanboy Rampage blog) who would shout nonsense in my comments sections ’til they tired of it, or I blocked them. I still have one dude who pops up whenever I suggest that maybe people who aren’t white and straight should be treated as humans, to tell me the error of my ways.
But “jerks is jerks,” I guess, and running a site that allows public commenting is alas opening a door for people to do this sort of thing, and that’s just the price paid.
And, hoo boy, there’s social media of course, which is just a madhouse filled with confirmed social deviants just itching to pile abuse onto someone who made the mistake of being, say, a woman. Little different from “Bozo,” they just cast out their hooks and see who they can catch.
A slight variation I’ve encountered more recently on the usual trolling is “the super fan,” someone who is extremely possessive of their specific obsession. So much so, that someone else discussing that obsession in a way they don’t personally approve of is to be attacked and diminished in favor of their superior perspective.
One example that continually amuses me is when blogging brother Andrew and I were on Xwitter discussing (WARNING: old people video game references incoming) Coleco’s game releases for the Atari 2600. We’d referenced the fact that many of these games were ports from the more advanced Colecovision, and by pure necessity had to be downgraded to be able to perform on the 2600’s older hardware.
We weren’t denigrating Coleco for this, we weren’t cast aspersions on the people who made these games…we were simply acknowledging the literally undeniable fact that the 2600 games had to less complex than their Colecovision counterparts. The hardware and memory differences demanded it.
Well, well, well, the world’s #1 Colecovision fan somehow found our discussion and injected himself right in there, outraged that we would call these games incompetent trash (we didn’t) and that we’d insult the programmers’ knowhow (we also didn’t). The point of object seemed to be the word “downgraded,” which we meant entirely dispassionately and he thought was an offense of the highest order.
Andrew just blocked the guy right away, which was the wise move, though I think it was my years in retail that made me attempt to reason with the guy and get him to see what we were saying. Because I’m talking about it here, you can probably guess that didn’t work out, even to the point where the guy actually tried to tattle on us to some old former Coleco programmer who also happened to be on Xwitter. (I never saw that programmer make a comment, presumably because he probably rolled his eyes and thought “ugh, this guy again.”)
Since I’ve abandoned Xwitter and moved to Bluesky, I haven’t had to deal with too many problem people, and those that turn up are very easily dismissed with Bluesky’s very solid blocking option. However, there was one case just the other week, one that inspired this very post.
On the occasion of President Jimmy Carter’s passing, I posted this MAD cover, dated March 1978:
Along with it, I included the caption “This was as defining an image of Jimmy Carter for me in my childhood as just about anything else. RIP.” You can see the post right here for yourself.
This wasn’t intended as an overtly political post (even if posting about a former President at all is inherently political). It was simply a comment on the fact that, as a child at the time, my primary interaction with politics on that scale was via entertainment aimed at me (or not necessarily at me, but seen by me anyway, such as Dan Aykroyd’s impression of Carter on Saturday Night Live). To this day, this drawing (by Jack Rickard) exists in my brain as the primary picture in my mind of the man. I mean, they don’t call these the “formative years” for nothing.
I figured, if I were to get any objection to this post at all, it’d be from someone who was annoying that I didn’t discuss Carter’s full legacy, good and/or ill, or that I reduced him to this goofy image. And I was ready to argue, if I had to, with, well, what I said in the previous paragraph.
What I got instead was this, a straight up objection to me even using MAD at all. You can see my immediate response, and his, um, whatever that is in the image, too:
Not shown is my second response, where I told him 1) I’ve discussed MAD plenty of times on my comics blog, with its own category, and 2) I carry MAD in my store, both new issues and old. And as you can see by his second response, he did see that post and it did nuttin’ a’tall to mollify the guy. So, to Blocktown he went.
Digging a little deeper into the fella, I discovered he was on several Bluesky “blocklists” (lists which, if you follow, block everyone on that list) which tells me this isn’t unusual behavior for him. And a fellow blogger has told me he’s turned up in their comments whenever he uses images from MAD for the same reasons “Alfred” gives above…not liking comic book guys who talk about his favorite magazine.
It’s…amazing that someone puts this much vitriol into complaining about something that, let’s face it, isn’t real. Or at least aimed at the wrong people, to give him the barest benefit of a doubt. As online pal ThisIsBrian said, “That sure is a lot of worrying for a guy who’s using the name of the most famous non-worrier there is.”
Compared to the abuse some folks get online, this is nothing. Some trolls out there can be real dangers, with threats and massive online pile-ons of their victims and showing intentions of (and following through with) real world crimes. The guys I’ve mentioned here are just minor annoyances, bemusing at best, and easily dealt with. They aren’t much different from the “Bozos” of yore, spitting out anger and insults, just more specific about their particular triggers. I’m betting that in person, they’re also just like “Bozo,” unassuming and bearing sheepish grins when outed for their behavior, their rage curtailed in fear of actual consequences.
So the new issue of the still-going-despite-reports-of-death MAD Magazine has this as its back cover:
Which is a good gag, playing off of this infamous cover from 1974:
When this cover hit the stands 50 years ago, the stands hit back, resulting in copies being returned and apologies made, though decades later, if I recall correctly, original copies were given away to new subscribers for a time.
It’s too bad this new iteration wasn’t the front cover of the new issue, but if they couldn’t get away with it back then, it seems unlikely they could get away with even this altered version now. It’s a good gag landing a solid blow on A.I. in arts, which you and I know is a problem but perhaps Johnny Q. Public could use a reminder.
So pal Brook (whom I should make a category for on this site, he comes up often enough) (and so I have) made another original art acquisition…this time, an original page from a Mad paperback by Angelo Torres:
This is, believe it or not, Brook’s fifth page from the same book. I told him to keep going and get all the art from it…surely that wouldn’t be too hard.
I believe the book in question is History Gone Mad from 1977, drawn by Torres and written by Tom Koch. Brook only told me the name of the book multiple times and my aged brain didn’t retain the info. But, that seems to be the likely suspect.
And the piece is great…I love seeing the paste-up work and the handwritten page number on the original art at the top. And the linework is so clean, as is the toning. This is a beautifully and expertly executed piece of illustration.
The hand “acting” is wonderful, with the fella digging into his pocket for change, and the messenger waiting for the tip to be placed in his hand:
And oh, that messenger’s face — perfection:
And yes, that is a little “a. torres” signature newly added to the piece at the bottom there, between those wonderful pairs of shoes. What a great art piece this is. Thanks to Brook for letting me get my dirty hands and even dirtier blog all over it.
So a little while back I was at the local grocery store, doing my weekly hunting and gathering as my Paleolithic ancestors once did, when I paused at the magazine section.
I used to love the magazine section of grocery stores. While my dad shopped, I, as a young Mikester, would hang out near all the books and magazines trying to pick which one I’d be able to talk my way into including with the evening’s haul. I was generally successful, as both my parents, like me, were voracious readers and we’d usually come home with a book or magazine(s) or both for them as well.
And the magazine sections used to be huge, or at least they appeared to be so to me in the 1970s/early 1980s. So many choices, so many weird and wonderful mags, and this was the era when you could still find comic book publications. Not so much the comic books, though there was a limited selection at some shops, but, like, the Marvel magazines were a little more common. That’s where I first spotted Pizzazz, for example, eventually getting a subscription (only for it to be cancelled shortly thereafter, with Amazing Spider-Man replacing the rest of the sub).
One quick memory I had specifically of the Marvel mags at the grocery store was when I spotted the Hulk mag on the shelf. I must have declared out loud to myself “hey, it’s Hulk” or something to that effect as an adult walking by, a really old guy, probably at least in his 40s, replied to me by cheerfully growling “HULK!” and, like, lifting up his arms, fists clenched, and stomping by Lou Ferrigno-style.
Anyway, I loved me the magazine sections way back when. The exotic allure of them has declined somewhat in my later years, as my employment has generally revolved around managing shops that were essentially all magazine racks. But that didn’t stop me on my recent visit to the grocery store, as I gazed upon the one section over which I used to obsess.
Much smaller now, of course, not just because my size relative to the rack has increased, but it’s just plain physically smaller. Not so many paperbacks, not so many magazines, not as much wild varieties of publications (wither CB Citizens’ Band? Wither UFO Report?).
But still present, in some form, is Mad. As a kid, Mad was an easy sell to take home as my dad read it when he was a kid, and realized a true and proper education included exposure to The Usual Gang of Idiots. Of course, today, the actual Mad magazine exists only in comic shops (like my own), but special publications are still offered to more general outlets. Like, say, grocery stores, where I spotted this item on the shelf:
Magazine-sized, squarebound, a mix of color and black and white interiors, featuring mostly the direct spoofs of sci-fi movies (like Star Wars, natch, and 2001: A Space Odyssey) along with other articles making fun of same. Out of nostalgia (both for Mad and for “buying something from the grocery store magazine rack”) along with a desire to have some of these parodies available to me in a slightly more permanent format, I threw it into the cart. Because I’m an adult now and I can buy dumb things if I want to. Usually. If I have the money.
An interesting thing I noticed in this publication is something I hadn’t noticed in Mad before. Well, okay, it’s not like I’ve been keeping tabs on this or anything, but I noticed a little editorial rejiggering of one of the spoofs. A spoof I am very familiar with, having read it when it originally came out about a million times. Let us go back to the heady days of Cover Date January 1978 (probably more like around Fall ’77) and take a peek at Mad #196, parodying one of the biggest and most influential movies in Hollywood history:
Oh yeah, that’s the stuff. And the parody itself is beautifully illustrated by Harry North, Esq. (and surprisingly not by the usual Mad movie parodist Mort Drucker), with some solid jokery by stalwarts Larry Siegel and Dick De Bartolo). However, one gag in the original…let’s say it didn’t age well:
Yes, I censored it slightly, don’t yell at me, people inclined to yell about this sort of thing. Anyway, the gag is playing off the public perception of some that Threepio’s…prissiness reads as “gay,” and this panel is leaning into and exaggerating that idea, complete with The Gay Stance. The derogatory use of that specific word was probably seen as okay because 1) it could be read as poking fun at that perception, and 2) as Bully‘s pal John mentioned to me when he helped me track down that original panel, the term had been used in All in the Family and was probably thought to be fair game.
Still, the joke can come across as homophobic (and while Artoo, from inference, may be a dick in the movies, I think we all prefer to assume he’s not that much of a dick), and that particular use of that term has, as we’ve hopefully grown more aware of and sensitive to the needs of others, become not acceptable.
As such, here’s how the panel appears in the 2023 publication I’ve purchased:
Okay, the joke…hmmm, surface level, still not great. And we’re farther away from the “Threepio is obviously gay” idea that was once so widespread, piggybacking on the Star Wars phenomenon itself, and thus losing that context to inform the panel. And Artoo still comes across as a real jerk.
But That Word is gone, because in today’s culture just casually throwing it out there for a gag like this, is Not Cool, Dude. Not a great joke, particularly removed from the wider cultural context which, frankly, didn’t help it all that much in the first place, but at least now it won’t read as just straight-up offensive. It’ll just be normal levels of offensive.
Over the years, Mad hadn’t necessarily had the…greatest track record with jokes involving the LGBTQIA community early on, punching down more often than not. I believe, though, they’ve avoided reprinting much of that material. But the Star Wars parody is…well, it’s the original Star Wars parody from Mad, it can’t be easily buried. And sometimes things just don’t age well, so if they wanted to keep reprinting the Star Wars parody, well, someone made the decision to take out the slur.
Like I said, I don’t know if this was as widespread practice with Mad‘s reprints, or it they purposely avoided that content until they couldn’t.
About twenty years ago Mad put out a special that included all the Star Wars parodies at that point. I had a copy of that, but no longer, and I believe That Word was still intact. If anyone can confirm, or if they know of other examples of Mad fiddling with jokes from back then that don’t hold up now, please let me know.
thanks to Bully, the Little Shocked Bull, for production help. DON’T LOOK, BULLY
So on the occasion of Al Jaffee’s 99th birthday (and my 51st) I wrote about getting this wonderful book:
…which remains one of my prize possessions. Like I said in that post, I was but a young Mikester and had to save my allowance a bit to afford this extravagant purchase. But it was money well invested, as the book was provided me many solid laughs over the decades, not just from reading it but simply from remembering it and the joy it brought me.
One of my favorite articles in that book, and one that still comes unbidden to my mind on a more regular basis than you might think, is the one where Jaffee built actual physical models of purported kids’ drawings:
It’s an odd example of Jaffee’s work, as it doesn’t showcase his illustrations (aside from those alleged kid drawings) but it’s memorable nonetheless.
And as per my last post, I found at least one of the MAD paperbacks pictured on Mark Evanier’s site, MAD Monstrosities:
Alas, nearly all my paperback books remain boxed up and not terribly easy to access, but I did manage to find this one. My MAD Book of Magic remains AWOL, but I know it’s around here somewhere. But Monstrosities is filled with great mostly full-page cartooning filled with delightful grotesqueries as only Jaffee can lay them down on the page. I don’t know how long I’ve had this, but I must have picked it up during my prime MAD reading age, so probably around 1979-1981.
Searching my shelves I found another book that, frankly, I’d forgotten I had:
Based on the price sticker in the corner, this was obviously a thrift store pick-up. I’m not the biggest fan of the “Snappy Answers to Stupid Questions” gags…I mean, I like ’em fine, obviously enough to drop $1.99 on this book, but I always preferred Jaffee’s other efforts. But his artwork is always wonderful to behold, especially in this larger format (and no one does A Prance quite like Jaffee, as you can see on that person on the left of the cover there). Plus, I do have to say I did always like the added touch of an extra empty word balloon for you to add your own Snappy Comeback. Were they as snappy as Big Al’s? Probably not, but it was nice of him to offer you the chance.
Also, come to think of it, that’s kind of a Snappy Answer to a Stupid Question on the cover of that Monstrosities book, isn’t there? It’s also interesting that “Snappy Answers” is what’s referenced on the cover, and not “Fold-ins” but, as shown on the cover, you were likely to get more of one than the other in here, and why remind people of a feature that’s not present in the book?
What he’s probably going down in history for is the aforementioned Fold-ins, a play on the “Fold-Outs” you might find in, say, certain gentlemen’s magazines of note. It’s clever, it’s intriguing (as you try to guess the final image before folding and finding out), and a little annoying if you’re a comic shop owner dealing in old comics and magazines and you have to grade down most MADs you get in because the back cover is creased. But, such is the sacrifice for art.
And what art it was. I didn’t even mention his “Hawks and Doves” strips. Or the articles about new, needed inventions or how he drew the absolutely best vomit in the biz. Or that one issue of MAD where instead of a Fold-In he created a gag strip where if you held it up to the light, an image of Alfred E. Neuman would appear. Or his Tall Tales strips. Or the fact that he was drawing for several Golden Age books long before MAD was even around.
He was in all respects a legend. I’m glad he lived such a long life and could see how much everyone loved him and appreciated his work.
So long, Al.
So I was processing some new acquisitions at the shop (said shop being Sterling Silver Comics in lovely midtown Camarillo, CA — shop early, shop often) when I peeped my peepers at the back cover of Cracked #317 (July 1997):
I don’t know why this struck me as oddly as it did. It feels awfully…insular a gag to put in a nationally-distributed magazine, maybe? The whole “Electric Superman” thing (featured in this long-ago post of mine with the possibly increasingly-inaccurate title) got some real world coverage at the time, as I recall, but I don’t feel like it was a lot. Remember, by 1997 non-comics-initiated folks were still coming into the shop, seeing Superman titles on the stands, and asking “hold on, isn’t he dead?” That feels like it was the primary public perception of Superman at the time. Not to mention comics were still in, or crawling out of, a market crash, so they didn’t have the huge cultural cache they did only a few years prior.
But of course, not every gag needs to, over even can, hit with everybody, and this one (drawn by Alan Kupperberg) may have received a brief flicker of amusement from those Cracked readers who also had a foot in the door of the comics hobby and were aware of Superman’s then-current status.
I know, I know, I’m overthinking it. Maybe the gag was conceived during that very brief window the new costume was getting some publicity and everyone thought “oh, yeah, this’ll still be a thing everyone will be talking about in three or four months.” Or maybe Cracked was increasingly being sold through the direct comics market and thus more likely to find readers who’d appreciate this joke.
Anyway, I just thought it was odd. Also, “person getting shot is funny” doesn’t, um, play quite as well at this current moment, needless to say.
Coincidentally, I also received in the same collection a copy of Mad Super Special #96 (1994):
…which, as you can see, was their big Super Hero issue. The gags are a little broader, either playing off characters’ more general perception or placing them in jokes that require no special comics knowledge (man complains about a fly in his soup, which is promptly webbed out of there and eaten by Spider-Man), or parodying specific events that anyone reading the mag would know (like the 1989 Batman film), or making jokes about things that are eternal and forever embedded in our culture, like, er…Yellow Pages ads:
…or, um, phone booths:
Okay, admittedly that’s mixing two different things here, the eventual aging of once-current gags versus a gag that kinda hit the ground limping in the first place. But it seemed to me an interesting contrast between humor that, though near archaic, is still amusing, versus a joke attached to an event that’s irrelevant now and was barely relevant to its potential audience then.
AND THOUGH YOU HOLD THE KEYS TO RUIN
OF EVERYTHING I SEE 
WITH EVERY PRISON BLOWN TO DUST
MY ENEMIES WALK FREE
THOUGH ALL MY KINGDOMS TURN TO SAND
AND FALL INTO THE SEA
I’M MAD ABOUT YOU (SLUGGO)
I’M MAD ABOUT YOU
from various issues of MAD magazine, credits in alt-text
So as far as I’m able to tell, looking at the cover gallery on the Grand Comics Database, the above issue of MAD Magazine was the very first one I (or rather, my parents) purchased new off the rack. I was six years old. I picked up subsequent issues on a more or less regular basis up until the early 1980s, as well as getting several older issues either at used book stores or in that paper sack filled with older editions an uncle gave me (discussed here just back in March). And of course, I would pick it up now and again after that, even until relatively recently.
As I’m sure you’ve likely heard, MAD is ending its run of new material, going all-reprint and leaving the newsstands for solely comic-shop sales. According to the linked article, apparently end-of-year editions with new material are planned, and the reprint paperbacks and themed collections will continue. I guess that recent relaunch with a new first issue was a last-ditch attemnpt to save the magazine, and it didn’t work. I mean, sales went up on MAD a little for me, but it appears it didn’t improve enough across the board to save it.
This is terrible news. As I said on Twitter when I heard about this, MAD did a lot to teach children about how to spot bullshit in the world, letting them know that there are a whole lot of people, and companies, and products, and news organizations, and pretty much everything else in the world, all devoted to trying to pull a fast one on you. Yes, there were just plain ol’ jokes, too, but this was the first introduction to sometimes very biting satire a lot of children were exposed to, and it makes me sad that, even as MAD‘s influence has diminished over the years, that it won’t be here at all, at least as current, topical, and more relatable material that will educate children.
Not that there isn’t lots and lots of great (and still relevant) articles in MAD‘s near-70 years of publishing. And who knows, maybe today’s youth fill learn something about Nixon, and hippies, kind of like how I did reading my uncle’s old issues. A lot of the material is just straight-up funny, and timeless, and still absolutely worth reading. But the lack of freshness and topicality…that can’t help but hurt.
Let me tell you one thing from MAD that’s stuck with me all these years. I mean, literally, for decades. There was one of those features taking on product packaging by manufacturers who were trying to deceive you, the consumer, about the items they were trying to push on you. I don’t even recall the specifics of the whole article, or even who did it (I feel like it was Al Jaffee) but one of the gags was about how the wrapping on a candy bar would remain the same size, but the size of the candy bar itself would get progressively smaller as time went by. But, of course, you couldn’t tell because the cardboard holder the candy rested in was still at that larger size. When I saw that, it was like a light went on in my head, and I was all “hey…YEAH, WHAT’S UP WITH THAT?” That image came to mind every time I bought a candy bar, or essentially any food item where the packaging size belied the actual goodies within.
It’s an unfortunate loss, but I feel like maybe, someday, a new batch of funny people wtih an askew vision will get a chance to bring it back, teaching kids how to critically view the world while simultaneously aggravating parents witih “this trash,” just like MAD always should. I prefer to think MAD isn’t gone, just resting, waiting to return to us in our time of greatest need. …Which is, you know, now, so I hope HAD hurries the hell up and comes back already.
So in response to my post about the comic strip reprint books from last Monday, some of you mentioned the many Mad paperbacks that were part of our childhoods, too. Are any of those classic paperbacks still in print in that original format, or have they all been supplanted by larger trade editions and new repackagings and such? Been years since I’ve seen any on a shelf that were new…the last 30 years of dealing with them in comics retail has affixed them firmly in my head as “vintage items,” always used, always a thing firmly of the past.
But that wasn’t always the case with me. As a young Mikester, I had an uncle give me a paper sack full of his old Mad magazines that he had bought in previous years, which coincided with my own then-burgeoning love of the newest issues. I was buying (or cajoling my parents into buying) the new issues starting around 1976 or 1977, and the Mads I got from my uncle were from around the late 1960s through the early-to-mid 1970s, though there were a few stragglers that were earlier still. A small handful of the paperback reprints were also passed along to me, also from my uncle but from a couple of other relatives as well.
Okay, that doesn’t quite explain how I didn’t always see the paperbacks as being “old” things, since, you know, even as a kid I was getting those books second-hand. I found those old, beat-up books and magazines fascinating. I seem to remember mentioning, either here or on the Twitters (it all blurs together sometimes) that the “new” Mads I was getting off the shelves at the supermarket or newsstand were “my” Mads, fresh and current. The slightly older Mads, like the stack of mags I got from my uncle, were just similar enough to what I was getting new to be recognizable, but there was just a very slight “off-ness” to them, that there was just enough different in these previous editions to create some kind of reaction in me. Might have been the subject matter (“What’s this ‘Vietnam’ they keep talking about?” “Boy, there sure is a lot of this Nixon guy in these issues”) or the presentation (seem to remember photos being incorporated into more of the articles), and the other occasional oddity (“Whoa, there was a grey Spy?”).
But the paperbacks dug back even farther into the Mad archives, heavy on the early 1960s stuff, which looked and felt quite a bit different from the then-modern Mad I was reading. Sure, many of the creators were the same, doing work that was still somewhat famliar, but earlier Dave Berg and Don Martin cartooning in particular felt drastically different from what I was used to as a late-1970s Mad adopter. …Not to say I didn’t like it, of course. I was fascinated by the evolution of this magazine.
Anyway, the paperbacks. I started looking for new copies of the paperbacks in bookstores, buying (or, again, cajoling my parents into buying) copies when we could find them. This filled in more gaps in my…well, “understanding” isn’t really the right word, since the reprints tended to be context-free, though I would check the copyright page to get an idea of the approximate years they were reprinting from. Perhaps filling in gaps in my appreciation for the many forms Mad has taken over the years.
I also realized that there was new material being offered by Mad in their paperbacks as well. Just books filled with new cartoons I never saw in the pages of the mag, by creators I loved from there. My specific favorites were ntonio Prohías, who did Spy Vs. Spy, and Sergio Aragones, who did purt’near everything. Finding out there were whole new paperbacks featuring the Spies and Sergio’s cartooning was astounding to me, and became the focus of my Mad paperback collecting.
I did eventually track down most of them at the many bookstores that used to be in our area, but a couple still eluded me. Thas, circa 1980, I made my first sojourn into the world of mail order. I mean, I’d had subscriptins to magazines at around that time (like Pizazz, or Ranger Rick) but I had never written in to specifically oreer certain individual items before. But Mad made it easy…there was an order form for the paperbacks in one of the mags, where I could check off the ones I needed (one Spy Vs. Spy book, don’t remember which one, the Sergio book Viva MAD!, and a third book I do not recall, but I think it was an Al Jaffee one). Totalled up the price with postage, my dad took me to the local convenience store to get a money order, we dropped it in the mail, and thus began the kid-equivalent of an eternity waiting for the package to arrive.
And arrive it did, and lo and behold was my collection of Spy Vs. Spy and Sergio paperbacks complete…until the next book, and the next book, and so on.
I kept getting Sergio books for a while after I stopped following the new issues of the magazine itself, which I’d mostly stopped getting around 1982. I certainly had stopped getting the Super Specials, because by that point it was feeling like I’d already seen most of the material they were reprinting.
That wasn’t it for my Mad reading, however. I did get the occasional issue here and there, and was way into it again at some point in the mid-2000s. I bought those specials that reprinted, in full and in chronological order, all the original Mad color comics from the 1950s. I have a copy of the infamous middle finger cover. And I have this issue, which Sergio was nice enough to scribble on for me during one of his many visits to my former place of employment:
Here’s a better look:
So anyway, I still have all my Mad books…some of my magazines have gone to the wayside, but I still have quite a few of those, too, I’ve even added a few more of the old paperbacks to the collection as I’ve come across ones I’ve not yet read. However, I haven’t been reading the new Mad, though I’m certainly carrying it at the shop (where it sells nicely, thank you). I may not be a regular Mad reader anymore, but I’m still a Mad fan, and I’m glad it’s still around.
So a long time ago, shortly after I entered the high-flying life of comics retail, I decided to pick up a copy of this on New Comics Day:
A coworker asked what exactly made me decide to pick up this oddball indie comic, and I told her the truth: it was that awesome Jack Davis cover. I wasn’t certain I was going to enjoy the non-Jack Davis contents, but good gravy, what a cover. I couldn’t resist it.
It seems like Jack Davis drew for everything. We all know his Mad work, and his movie posters, and his awesome EC Comics stories, and his video game ads, and his Sesame Street drawings, and his TV Guide covers, and his album covers, and his ad containing the second greatest* sound effect in comics (“SLAMDUNK!”) of all time, and surely much, much more.
Anyway, a rumor spread late last night that he’d passed away, and it turns out, nope, Mr. Davis is still with us, and thank goodness for that. When the “news” started to spread, I put together this post, but realized that I hadn’t seen any official confirmation yet so I’d better hold off putting it on the site, and I was right to do so. However, there’s no reason to wait to enjoy the man’s work, so please, visit some of those links or pull out your Mads or your ECs and appreciate that one of the legendary giants of cartooning is still with us.
Thanks, Jack!
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