Lay Lines by Carol Lay for February 08, 2021

I miss MAD. I know that it still exists in some form, but without the parodies it’s hardly the same.

I just discovered that MAD artist Tom Richmond is making a book of MAD style parodies called Claptrap on Indiegogo. I’m not getting a thing for mentioning it, but I hope that word gets around to show the powers that be that there’s still a market for it.

Potrzebie.

“Are we having fun yet?”

Man I have not seen Alfred E. Neuman in ages. I loved reading that magazine as a kid. If the 7-11 or local comic book store was sold out I would settle for Cracked but it was simple a cut below Mad!

The answer, of course, is “sadly, no”.

We need more mockers!

Anyone else ever see a resemblance between Alfred and Bush 43?

It’s the ears…

I had a subscription in the mid-to-late ‘60s. When your subscription was running out, they didn’t send you a million renewal letters; they enclosed a card with the last issue, congratulating you on the prospect of receiving no more of them. (“…but, if you’re the kind who never learns from past mistakes, you can renew by sending us our payment with this card…”)

It’s my belief that MAD trained us boomers to be cynical at an early age about advertising and politics, but did the job so well that it just couldn’t keep up with our growing cynicism as we aged. I stopped buying the magazine in the mid-1970s, switching to the National Lampoon for a while before getting bored with that too.

When the magazine was absorbed by Warners/DC and started accepting advertising, I knew it was the end.

R.I.P. William G. and Alfred E.

I had every issue from the debut of the magazine till I graduated from high school. Sadly they were in horrible shape. Zero collector’s value. Mad was one of the things that pointed me to the wrong path. I’ll always be grateful to the Usual Gang of Idiots. The influence of the artists lives on, political cartoons especially.

“What, Mi Lai?”

https://www.cbr.com/comic-book-legends-revealed-533/3/

One day during a visit to New York, I was thrilled to find myself on Lafayette Street, and made sure that I paid a visit to 225, which I had long remembered as the home of Mad and Lyle Stuart, publisher of eclectic books. Apparently the building is overpriced condos now, but once it was the centre of a particularly mad world.

https://www.openculture.com/2020/10/the-time-when-national-lampoon-parodied-mad-magazine.html

(includes a link to the parody itself: https://andeverythingelsetoo.blogspot.com/2020/02/what-me-funny.html )

As a fan of Mad (especially in its pre-magazine comic form) and then the NatLamp, I thought that this was right on. I particularly liked Citizen Gaines, a very apt parody of a parody, with Gaines as Kane and Kurtzman as Leland..

(continued…)

I miss Don Martin comics. Aw heck, I miss all of the old original classic Mad Magazine artists.

damn…this is fabulous. Robert Crumb worthy.