While I’m in an EC Comics frame of mind this weekend, let’s talk about everyone’s favorite illustrated satire magazine, Mad.

Originally released in 1952 under the EC banner by Harvey Kurtzman and William Gaines, the original incarnation of Mad was written almost entirely by Kurtzman and it had a far different look and attack plan than what most people know it for, if still slinging its trusty brand of shenanigans straight from the gate.

After 24 issues at EC, Mad shifted its tone, artistic vision and blazing lampoonery toward roasts of pop culture, movies, t.v. shows, politics, sports, consumerism, sexuality and society at large. Moreover, the new order of Mad birthed a flagship mascot who has endured and schlocked each cover for seven decades, the gap-toothed lieutenant of lampoon, Alfred E. Neumann. “What, me worry?” being Alfred E.’s call-to-arms for all knuckleheads at-heart.

Iconic creators who any Mad habitue can roll off their tongues like Al Jaffee, Sergio Aragones, Dave Berg, Don Martin, Mort Drucker, Frank Jacobs and Antonio Prohias came along in the mid 1950s with the shift in editorial leadership from Kurtzman to Al Feldstein. The 1960s through the 1980s was the most prolific time period for Mad, and no glittering personality was safe. Some had the sense of humor to embrace being tomahawked by Mad’s “usual gang of idiots.”

Heralded as Mad magazine’s proto pantheon (along with artist Will Elder from the roots of the magazine), no creative team since has been able to match these juvenile delinquents of parody. Well, maybe Tom Bunk has a case. So glaring is the fact that Mad continues to reprint its classic pages from these artists and writers, not merely in the countless double-sized “special” compilations, but also since pulling the wool over their readership’s eyes by announcing the magazine’s finality in April of 2018. Only to hoist the same marketing trick as comic book imprints themselves, rebooting and resetting at a new volume Issue # 1 that same year. Dirty pool, but that’s the name of the game in the funny book business these days.

I’ve had in-and-out love affairs with Mad magazine, about which William Gaines himself is once quoted as saying “We must never stop reminding the reader what little value they get for their money!” while issuing the caveat to his audience of thinking for themselves. When I’ve gotten on Mad benders at different times in life, I’ve sat there chuckling the hardest at Spy vs. Spy segments (even under threat of tickle torture, I’ll never tell which one I’ve rooted for all my life), Don Martin’s one-pager cartoons of buffoonery, Dave Berg’s always insightful “The Light of Side of…” and anything Al Jaffee wrote or drew.

Especially his essential “Mad Fold-Ins” that I learned to develop a soft touch with so as not to violate the minting of the book. Sorry, that just comes from having worked in comics retail during the early 1990s. Even when there were gloriously sinful boobies molded from those maniacally brilliant fold-ins. Jaffee, more than anyone pushing the envelope with snot, barf and pimply bare butt gags in Mad, went there whenever he could get away with it.

I’ve twice had subscriptions (definitely the best way Mad can validate its claim of “Cheap!”) and I’ve enjoyed passing them back and forth with my stepfather, who, like me, has read the magazine in sporadic chunks of years, but also like me, ravenously while dug in. As a teenager in the 1950s, he was there in the beginning of Mad and let me tell you something; I never saw such joy in a man’s face when I brought him a copy of Mad’s 2024 Free Comic Book Day torching of DC Comics superheroes. Same as my birth father, who’s deadly accurate hand-drawn recreations of Don Martin’s bubblehead dolts were amongst his proudest achievements outside of model railroading. One of his clients for a commission piece being none other than Rod Stewart.

These ads plugging the magazine itself are a riot, but anyone who’s a longtime Mad buff will attest the magazine was lauded for its specialty in goofing on existing products with the same expert adolescent trash humor as Wacky Packages stickers, which used to rule my life from ages 9 to 12. Sometimes Mad got downright uncomfortable decades before the age of cancel and political incorrectness. An example being the model’s penchant for young boys in Mad’s “Clairold” hair product spoof, which was hilarious once, nowadays a one-way ticket to the sex offender registry.

This classic dish on Pabst Blue Ribbon beer (no coincidence, my stepfather’s go-to brew) is probably my favorite Mad ad pasquinade ever. Urrrrrrrrp!!!

–Ray Van Horn, Jr.