US Satire Magazine 'MAD' to Stop Publishing after 67 Years
MAD magazine was at the peak in the early 70s when it hit more than 2 million subscribers. It was popular because it used to mock everything from shifting social mores to cultural attitudes.
The magazine that has kept America in good humor and which has helped redefine American satire and influenced comedians and comic artists for half a century, will soon be going to disappear from the newsstand. This October, MAD will cease to encourage fresh creative and artistic force, which it has been doing for the last seven decades.
MAD was the only venue for comic artists and cartoonists to grow artistically and shape the national conversation. Well-known names of the time such as Al Jaffee, Harvey Kurtzman and Mort Drucker were associated with the magazine for decades.
Comedy kings like Judd Apatow and Stephen Colbert have written in the MAD collections, about how the magazine inspired them in their formative years.
MAD magazine was at the peak in the early 70s when it hit more than 2 million subscribers. It was popular because it used to mock everything from shifting social mores to cultural attitudes. The magazine brings out satire from every incident, controversy, political or social events like from the most pop-culture muscle as a powerhouse of fresh irreverence to Watergate-era, President Richard Nixon, Vice President Spiro to the big spoof of the hit Oscar-winning movie ‘The Sting’, MAD touched all.
But by the 90s owing to commercial pressures it had to change its direction. In recent years as the circulation started to fall, the magazine owned by Warner Bros shifted to a quarterly publishing schedule and moved its offices from New York to Los Angeles.
MAD Cartoonist, Al Jaffee said, “We have influenced or entertained a great many people who are now grown and introduced it to their children. It is mostly nostalgia now”.
From October though MAD will disappear from newsstands, but it will remain available to the subscribers and through comic shops. The magazine will not produce any new content, except for the end-of-year specials. All issues after that will be republished content from the 67 years of publication.
Former MAD artist Tom Richmond wrote on his blog, “Of course we all knew this was coming. Last week, it lay off one art director and three of the four remaining editors. MAD had an incalculable influence on satire and comedy in general and the humor of the entire planet”.
He also added that the magazine, “regularly featured some of the greatest cartoonists who ever lived like Harvey Kurtzman, Jack Davis, Mort Drucker, Wally Wood, Will Elder, Al Jaffee, Sergio Aragones, Don Martin, Paul Coker…too many to list, really”.
Editor Harvey Kurtzman and publisher William Gaines founded MAD magazine in the year 1952. It was first launched as a comic book, later it became a magazine. The magazine was widely imitated affecting the satirical media, as well as the cultural landscape of the 20th century America. Al Feldstein as its editor, the readership increased to more than two million during the early 70s. From its start in 1952 till 2018, Mad published 550 regular issues, as well as hundreds of reprint as “Specials”.