There are three good reasons I can see why it has happened:
- The magazine format is (unfortunately) a dying medium and Mad relied heavily on newsstands and subscriptions.
- Their parent company, Warner, folded them under DC Comics' umbrella to save money and they've never been comfortable as a cog in a corporate machine.
- They're not relevant.
To that last point, do you realize it's been 25 years since The Simpsons mocked Mad's toothless humour in the episode "Bart of Darkness"? ("'The Lighter Side of Hippies.' They don't care whose toes they step on!"). I mean, 25 years! The Simpsons themselves have been toothless and irrelevant for the last 20 years!
People of a certain age (ie, older than me) wax nostalgically about how subversive Mad was in its heyday, that it was a real "truth to power" publication (Mike Sterling has a nice reminiscence here). And even in my junior high years, kids who brought Mad to school were rebels.
Yet, for all that, I can't recall a time among my friends or online where someone asked, "Hey, did you read that new issue of Mad?" Like, there was never a standout story which got people talking. Instead, Mad had a sense of sameness; you might ask, "Have you ever read a Spy vs. Spy?" but never ask, "Have you ever read this Spy vs. Spy?" I feel like after reading a certain number of Mads one reached their limit and didn't need to read more. The names of the celebrities and movies being parodied might change, but little else did.
It was just two months ago that I read the four volume set The Mad Archives, which cover the first 24 issues of Mad, comprising all of the full-colour comic book-format issues plus the first issue of the magazine format. Those issues were the product of Harvey Kurtzman, a brilliant humourist, but at times the archives were a struggle to get through. For the first two years of publication, Mad was a bi-monthly comic, but in its third year it went monthly and that seems to have been more than Kurtzman could manage. The book got a bit tedious in its third year because Kurtzman was so clearly trying to fill up pages to make deadlines instead of assembling quality material. There were far too many pages with recycled art, photo captions or even next-to-no-content (the 'joke' being that the page would be practically blank or illegible) again and again.
And yet, Mad really was something special. In those issues there were running features by Wally Wood & Bill Elder which mocked popular comic strips or comic book characters and the first few movie parodies showed up. Among those parodies was, of course, 'Superduperman' in Mad #4, a parody of Superman which turned out to be immensely influential on the comic book medium, as a young Alan Moore absorbed a lot of lessons on how to deconstruct super heroes from Kurtzman & Wood's jokes.
It's funny, though, that the magazine format Mad wasn't something I thought of as a comic book. Through my teenage years, I thought of 'comic books' as a publishing format, not a type of storytelling. I saw comic strips and Mad magazines as something separate--which, I later learned, was one reason why Bill Gaines was happy to transition Mad from the comic book format to magazines--comics books were seen as an exclusively children's medium, but magazines were not. It was a shrewd move for Gaines (and also something Kurtzman demanded, but Kurtzman walked off Mad only a year later; he went on to create Trump, Humbug, and Help!, but none of them really stuck).
I have a lot of admiration for many of Mad's usual gang of idiots: Kurtzman, Wood, Elder, John Severin, Sergio Aragones, Al Jaffee, Dave Berg... and I was impressed that at times they attracted some of my favourite non-comics humourists like Stan Freberg and Bob & Ray. I'm glad that for more than 60 years, there was a place for Mad in this weird little world of ours. I read very few issues of Mad, but I was happy there was a continually successful comics publication that wasn't a super hero book. RIP Mad. And, by extension, this is the true death of EC Comics.
Definitely not a comic book. I loved Mad and Cracked. I think there was a decent third mag similar to those two. Sick, maybe?
ReplyDeleteI think the Mad story intersects with that of EC comics but oh my Goddess, those were some amazing stories with a similar shtick to Inner Sanctum Mysteries. The Crypt Keeper is very similar to Raymond, is it? on Inner Sanctum Mysteries, which also has a direct link to CBS Radio Mystery Theater. Virtually all horror comics owe a debt to radio and other shows like well, pretty much all of the horror ones but the Inner Sanctum guy and E.G. Marshall were two hosts that could at times be involved with the story being narrated and are among the most memorable voices/shticks of all time on OTR.
Some people search out pre-code movies for their racy details or bad guys who win as a type of genre. The Horror Comic in most of its forms--Ghost Manor, and a few others but House of Secrets by DC, I think it was, had some sort of ghoul motioning you into the house and he was very, scary to me when I was younger-- is all but entirely in debt to OTR horror shows for the form and length of the stories and were virtually always anthology comics.
Something else that you might not have done is that for a couple of years, I subscribed to Batman, Detective Comics, Superman, Action, Wonder Woman and Justice League of America(er, sorry dude, now they include the whole world. It was far cheaper and I had moved somewhere without any local convenience store racks but ironically or maybe not, it ruined the value of the comics which some times had broken wrappers plus the folded every single one in half, vertically which left a never to be removed fold that made the comics hard to hold and hard to read since you needed one hand to hold the comic down.
At times I try my hand at comedy and I wonder about the ethics but I love doing the Yes guy and the racetrack tout and the hotdog vendor guy in terms of referenced humor for new generations but really more so in terms of being a mimic.