Mad magazine C/D

First installment: Mad #262 - this one with Stevie Nicks ("Solo album by member of a hit group. One artist out of five means album is only one-fifth as good").

holy shit - thank you so much sebastian!

i swear i have never stopped thinking about that stevie nicks one

Wow, this is critical:

Al Jaffee Explains How Mad Magazine Made American Humor Jewish

The adamant refusal of the editors to explain the made-up word became a running joke. Today, Mad scholars theorize that potrzebie was in fact based on a Polish word that Kurtzman discovered on a jar of aspirin. According to Jaffee, though, this is not the case: “There was an expression in Lithuania when I was a kid — “putz-rebbe.” Harvey must have heard that. Putz is genitals and it is applied as an insult to the rebbe. It’s like saying, ‘Oh that stupid teacher’ or ‘putz-rebbe.’”

Reaching mass new readerships and training them to laugh at and challenge broader trends, Mad Magazine can be seen as a central force destabilizing mainstream platforms, and at times doing so from a Jewish American perspective. And as Jaffee pointed out, not only were they writers and artists taking down the mainstream world, they were also “making fun of ourselves. We made fun of a certain kind of Yiddishkeit just by using these words. Farshimmelt. Furshlugenner. Potrzebie.” Yet in the act of satirizing both worlds, the magazine transformed itself into a mainstream American voice. And in its evolution, Mad taught its broad readership to be more comfortable with New York Jewish culture. By the 1970s and 1980s, the writers’ rooms in virtually every sitcom on American TV were filled with men who had grown up reading Mad. If “Seinfeld” became the number one show in suburban Texas or in Boise, Idaho, it was in part because Mad had paved the way.

Read more: http://forward.com/culture/yiddish-culture/333672/al-jaffee-explains-how-mad-magazine-made-american-humor-jewish/#ixzz410y84BXE

Jack Davis valentines

https://twitter.com/DennisThePerrin/status/831536083624194049

Bought my first Mad in 25 years and I’m going to read this bastard cover-to-cover pic.twitter.com/9rQNVDIDvA

— Matt Prigge (@mattprigge) August 10, 2018

theoretically v intersted in looking at an issue of the Morrison / Goertz Brand New Gang Of Idiots era but literally never occurs to me to go and find a place that sells it

I've spent the last few days since I saw this photo trying to work out what the lion's facial expression reminds me of, realized this morning that it's one of those Mad Magazine covers where someone gags at the sight of Alfred E Neuman

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/DqshkTKV4AEax75.jpg

https://i.pinimg.com/originals/99/90/84/999084d8727a6b63d98e3809fd603985.jpg

whom amongst us is actually too young to know about this storied publication

no one who should be president

I’ve checked out a few issues of the Burbank version now and: it’s good!

Yeah, I picked up the recent issue with the Plop #1 reprint inside and enjoyed it - great Drew Friedman page especially - shame that they've given Bill Morrison the elbow

oh? [googles] ha ha ha oh man, DiDio and Lee sitting on an executive panel to decide which executives to fire, and picking Chiarello and Morrison without bursting into flames from shame immediately

the pre-Morrison editor responds to Mayor Pete Buttigieg: https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2019/05/14/pete-buttigieg-alfred-e-neuman-i-dont-see-it-i-also-dont-buy-mayors-response/

so...mad may be ending, at least according to this post i've seen linked to a couple times on twitter

:( if true, of course

https://jedleland.wordpress.com/2019/07/03/mad-magazine-is-shutting-down/

Blame Buttigieg...

https://vignette.wikia.nocookie.net/marvel_dc/images/b/b1/Dan_DiDio.JPG

Tracerhand’s post here is among the most affecting things I’ve read on this site. Mad magazine C/D

thank you for saying so. i will always remember it. and guess what - i found that raiders of the lost ark issue :)

to me it's not the same with glossy color pages tbh.

I was wondering why this thread kept rising to the top. Motherfucking DC, there really isn't anything they can't effortlessly ruin these days.

what a wonderful post tracer

feels unbelievable that this was only three years ago

https://www.comixexperience.com/savagecritics/retailing/the-case-against-dan-didio

he outlasted Nelson

i've been reading mad's latest incarnation and it is doing good work so i am not surprised DC plans to shut it down and allow red hood and the outlaws unlimited rope to play out

didn't realise this was out yet - Brian Hibbs running the 2018 bookstore numbers:

Our #8 publisher in the Top 750 is DC Entertainment.
This is, frankly, shocking to me. For the first decade-plus I have been doing these charts, DC’s attention to backlist had naturally rendered them the #1 publisher…. With a bullet! And even when, the last few years, they lost the #1 spot to Scholastic, they were still majorly, significantly always at least #2.

weird how if you fire the two employees most responsible for building the company's backlist from zero over the previous three decades, and aim at selling your own re-re-rebooted IP only on Wednesdays, your sales might go down?

Year # of placing titles Unit sales Calculated Retail price
[2003-2014 skipped]
2015* 119 1,074,304 $21,701,088
2016* 117 1,234,047 $23,203,071
2017 101 827,544 $15,234,525
2018 47 360,414 $7,810,753

6% of DC's annual book sales still come from three 1980s Alan Moore books, two of which they stole from him and his co-authors.

One of Karen Berger’s books is Dark Horse’s 3rd best-seller in bookstores: “Anthony Bourdain’s Hungry Ghosts” with just over 14k. RIP, man.

and aim at selling your own re-re-rebooted IP only on Wednesdays

yesterday: brain genius announcing to panels at SDCC that he's mad at the collections department for proposing and executing financially successful reprint projects bcz he only wants to sell new stuff that people don't like, instead of stuff that people enjoy

I saw a headline about that but I didn't actually click through and read it because I think it gave me a mini-stroke.

xp lol, typical

if they were at all intelligent, the main point would be to create comic plots that are easily collected, with the real success being enough demand to keep a portion of new storylines in print in collected form as new classics.

or in the case of MAD, the ability to rely on the extensive back catalog of material to print topical one-offs or prestige collections by era/topic/author. some completely obvious concept like "movie parodies of the oscar winners of X" or just shoving the Star Wars parodies out on the newsstand any time a new SW project comes out. they did exactly that in the mid/late 90s when the original movies were rereleased to theaters and I think I wore out my copy!

hell, just throw the old collections back into print. I was introduced to MAD through one of the early printings of the "Son of MAD" collections that was at my grandparents' house, probably bought by my dad or uncle. I need to hunt around, I had another paperback collection as a kid and bought a ton of issues starting with, I think, a Gremlins 2 parody

I got the digital collection of a Donald Trump thing they did a few years back to coincide with the election, and there was some decent material but it bizarrely didn't grab any deeper back catalog stuff, which definitely exists.

in the case of MAD, the ability to rely on the extensive back catalog of material to print topical one-offs or prestige collections by era/topic/author. some completely obvious concept like "movie parodies of the oscar winners of X" or just shoving the Star Wars parodies out on the newsstand any time a new SW project comes out. they did exactly that in the mid/late 90s

otm

completely insane that they close down the entire history of Mad in NYC, restart from scratch in Burbank with an EIC so expensive they have to lay him off a year later, and don’t have a plan around monetising the generations of goodwill around their content

completely insane DC

Fixed that for you.

I was pondering last night after posting that -- if there was some subscription service where they'd dig up a handful of relevant comics from the whole of the run and you could view them as a daily comics type of thing, it'd be great! Stupid American aggressive posturing toward Iran in the news? Guess what, we've got decades of content! Here's a mini-collection we put together for this week.

I honestly don't know why at this point they wouldn't just offer the entire kit and caboodle up to the highest bidder. The only potential downside I can see is if an even worse company bought it.

I'd settle for a high quality scan of a bunch of material well-documented and dropped on archive.org

it looks like there's one issue on there

Fwiw, they did do a huge Star Wars book back around 2007, Mad About Star Wars, that did a great job of compiling that stuff. But having said that, more of this exact type of thing would be fantastic!

https://images-na.ssl-images-amazon.com/images/I/61%2B2OBkbiEL._AC_SY400_.jpg

the highest bidder.

No other bidder would be in any position to do 1/10 of what AT&T can do with it. AT&T just don’t want to do anything with it.

(And obv don’t have any motivating interest in a product that is designed to teach children that corporate-controlled art is a bad thing.)

can't believe cracked is a more viable brand than mad.

should license to fanta honestly

A properly done version of this, available as a digital download: https://www.amazon.com/Absolutely-MAD-Magazine-50-Years/dp/B000HKMQ64

not to get sic on you here but $150 for two discs of unsearchable lo-res scans doesn't strike me as properly done

a properly done version of /sic

ah i think i get your meaning.

This (link), but high-rez, searchable and digital. We're on the same page, all good.

I was this shockingly old when I learned that the rest of the EC catalogue is controlled by the Gaines Family. I thought DC had the lot, and was licensing out reprints to Dark Horse, IDW, Fanta etc.

Al Jaffee's on Twitter

Hello, Twitter! It's really me, the one and only Al Jaffee, here to alienate all my friends...

— Al Jaffee (@og_aljaffee) September 25, 2019

i watched some of the chris claremont documentary a few nights back and it turns out that jaffee was family friends with claremont's parents, so they came to him to help him get an internship at Mad... but he wouldn't do it because he said it was no place for a kid! So Jaffee connected Claremont with Stan Lee instead. Quoth Claremont "Once Stan found out I wouldn't have to be paid, I was in."

*folds tweet in from both sides*

yup, that's Al

Didn't know that about Claremont/Jaffee, great story!

Marvel bringing back Crazy magazine this week!

Hold off on the one-shot, though. It's being collected in a couple months alongside a bunch of old-school material.