Mad magazine C/D

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.

unless his recent illness has slowed him down, Aragones has only missed one issue of Mad in forty years (...)

― ( ͡° ͜ʖ͡°) (sic), Friday, March 15, 2013 8:22 AM (six years ago)

Sergio's still on an unbroken run after missing that issue in 1967. Dick DeBartolo had been on an unbroken run since Jun 1966, but the new issue of the mostly-reprint version drops next week without him in it.

(Aragones is on 451 issues in a row, DeBartolo's streak ends at 459 issues.)

Cool, Hadn't seen this thread before---here's my trib to the original, Kurtzman-edited Mad, with a link to
early 50s pop culture investigator Robert Warshow's account of visit to Mad offices, with his young son Paul, who'd turned him on to thee rag (another link to email conversation saga w mark s and others, from which this sprang):
https://thefreelancementalists.blogspot.com/2019/09/re-landscape-envy-ur-mad.html

feels unbelievable that this was only three years ago

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

― quelle sprocket damage (sic), Friday, July 5, 2019 5:54 AM (seven months ago)

https://web.archive.org/web/20160729181105/http://www.savagecritic.com/retailing/the-case-against-dan-didio/

Four years.

It sad, he was a publishor

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oxoEpVDGvPE

RIP Mort Drucker

There is a devastating satirical piece in MAD, it is devastating pic.twitter.com/qpFkicJBxu

— Matt Prigge (@mattprigge) April 10, 2020

Superb caricaturist! we'll miss him.

https://www.madcoversite.com/ugoi-mort_drucker.html
love that the accompanying drucker pic is a perfect drucker-ish background character

https://www.cbr.com/mad-magazine-al-jaffee-final-fold-in/

https://static1.cbrimages.com/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2020/06/final-fold-in-1591812108.jpg

https://static3.cbrimages.com/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2020/06/solved-1591812305.jpg

There is such a thing as a spoiler alert!

According to the link it's a parody of Bounty Law.

― Tracer Hand, Tuesday, 5 October 2021 14:11 (one hour ago) bookmarkflaglink

probably upthread already but https://www.tomrichmond.com/the-tarantino-story-part-3-bounty-law/06/08/2019/

― bobo honkin' slobo babe (sic), Tuesday, 5 October 2021 14:21 (one hour ago) bookmarkflaglink

Actually Mad is still going, sort of:

After AT&T acquired Time Warner in June 2018, Mad ended newsstand distribution, continuing in comic-book stores and via subscription, and slashed its new content in standard issues (save for end-of-year specials), with the regular magazine almost entirely utilising curated reprints with new covers, although minimal amounts of new content exist in each issue.
I only know this because I saw a newish issue at a local comic book store the other day.

― a superficial sheeb of intelligence (jon /via/ chi 2.0), Tuesday, 5 October 2021 14:29 (one hour ago) bookmarkflaglink

The issue after the Bounty Law one was the last issue of new material.

(#10, because in a move typically measured and thoughtful of the Nelson / Didio era, AT&T made the entire staff redundant, abandoned the Manhattan office with iirc years left on their lease, and restarted the numbering from scratch with new Burbank hires a year before being surprised that this had somehow cost money.)

― bobo honkin' slobo babe (sic), Tuesday, 5 October 2021 14:45 (fifty-nine minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

It's crazy to me that they did that ^ .. like, did they think what Mad fans wanted was a BREAK with its glorious past? Insane.

Speaking of the past, I have to say that six issues a year of reprints sounds...... pretty good?

I also have to say that a hardback copy of brand-new spoofs of classic movies like The Thing, done by Tom Richmond and Desmond Devlin sounds..... great??

https://www.indiegogo.com/projects/claptrap-movie-spoofs-in-a-classic-humorous-vein/x/27777512#/

Al Jaffee is 101!!!!!

*squints to see what phrase would say if I folded it*

It was on a deep dive into Match Game during the pandemic that I discovered that Dick DeBartolo is gay and married! The news thrilled me more than I thought it would.

s quints to see what phrase would say if I folded it

I can tell you if you pay me

bcz


A FEE IS 11

I'm getting these issues now by the way and they're great. The last one was themed around dogs and pets. I'm pretty sure the fold-ins are new. They're not by Jaffee but they're terrific.

There should be a collected omnibus of fold-ins that miraculously don't cause the page to deteriorate when you fold them. The fold-ins ruined all my old MADs as a kid.

My 7yo daughter has spent the pandemic era getting more and more obsessed with Beano. Kind of wish MAD was still an ongoing thing like it was in the 80s when I read it, as I think it'd be the perfect next step in her comics voyage, and would generally fit her level of cynicism.

It's a shame, because the short-lived 'new' Mad was actually p good.

Still, there's always Viz *s

God, she'd love Viz. Not for a couple more years though!

https://i.imgur.com/CPSBCN9.jpg

Not directly Al's work but

The regular backpage ad from Sundazed for the latest issue of Ugly Things is a proper Al Jaffee fold-in salute. Little surprise as to what it folds into. pic.twitter.com/UB4EmZQN1Y

— Ned Raggett (@NedRaggett) April 28, 2022

To me, hinged feet are the apex of visual comedy.

Who did the Rogan one (and can we see it pre-fold)?

Sorry sic I failed to capture it before my children lost it somewhere.

The latest edition is A MAD LOOK AT GREED and it is excellent. Honestly I have such a blast reading these. No ads. Just like the old days. The pages are slightly slicker. There are no Don Martin comics sadly, I guess he must have retained republishing rights.