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What, Me Worry? MAD Magazine Going Quarterly
theodp writes "MAD Magazine is about to put out its 500th issue, but starting with its April publication, the mag is cutting down to only four issues per year. The feedback we've gotten from readers,' quipped Editor John Ficarra, 'is that only every third issue of MAD is funny, so we've decided to just publish those.' MAD Kids and MAD Classics are ceasing publication entirely. Keep up the what-me-worry game face, Alfred!"
being as their mascot, and their mascot's philosophy, just left the white house
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
Given the amount of time we (by that I mean "I, and I assume everyone else is like me") spend online actually interacting with other people interested in a similar subject to ourselves it's no wonder we don't spend money on magazines any more. Unless the mag can survive on ad revenue alone, on transition to an online format that affords it's readers some interactivity then it'll die off. Obviously some titles, like Old Person Weekly or Luddite News, that cater for a non-tech-savvy audience will weather it better because their audience won't jump ship, but even those ones will be at the mercy of advertisers wanting to push their costs down.
I see a future without hardcopy magazines at all.
http://twitter.com/onion2k
Better than going bi-semiannually.
What do you mean? Is the world running out of 8 year olds?
Going digital might help, but the target audience is still there.
One of the things I always enjoyed from MAD was the fold-in images (they have a name, but that escapes me right now).
I found this overview - very interesting: http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2008/03/28/arts/20080330_FOLD_IN_FEATURE.html
I have been a mad subscriber for about 20 years now, and i love the mad. this really sucks. I hope they at least expand the issues to 200+ pages with extra content to make up for the extra few months of missing out. I wonder if dedicated mad subscribers will cancle their subscriptions because of this drastic change? anyhow I am going to keep mine until I determine this new format is the right direction to take the company.
Lets hope mad exceeds our lame expectations and continues their tradition far into the 21st century..
KAPUTNICK
Jean-Francois Im's blog
OK, Just one thing,
make 'em bigger.
sure, not the equivalent of 3 months worth of stuff, but more content than in just a single issue.
publications like MAD will need to evolve into new communication media in order to stay in business. They already have the formula, the characters, the jokes and the artists... just throw in some 2D animators and a few web programmers and voila'! cash made out of internet traffic.
Something curious is that Manga Magazines like Shonen Jump do not appear to be lowering their sales.
- Human knowledge belongs to the world
Since Obama said OK to Warrantless Wiretapping it kind of put a kink in the whole Spy v. Spy thing permanently. Now it's just sorta ___vs. Us.
Just put all the back issues on youtube.
I was surprised to find out they even still made the magazine. I never read them when I was a kid, but I've never even seen a single copy at any magazine stand since I was in the "demographic", which was quite a while ago.
I stopped reading Mad when Don Martin died. His cartoons were pure, unadulterated, fun. He had that rare insight that humor must be fun, it needs not always carry a transcendental message...
It's unfortunate that a staple of American culture has gone in this direction. For years, Mad Magazine was one of the last holdouts to not run ads, but now they do.
Since then, the quality of the humor has dipped significantly, but it's still better than other junk that passes for comedy these days. They're even now recycling classic "Lighter Side Of..." segments in their issues.
Whomever tagged this "nothing of value was lost" needs a history lesson. Mad has its original roots as a satire of horror comics today. Mad Magazine still exists, and so do a lot of your tenets of free speech with comics and video games, because Bill Gaines stood up to those who wanted to censor horror comics, against those who were "thinking of the children." Does that sound familiar to anyone else?
60 Minutes has several profiles on the writing staff over the years. There are numerous books by the same writers about working at Mad and Bill Gaines.
If Mad Magazine goes under, we lose an American icon.
You never expect irony, do you?
Want to be a professional wrestler? Visit www.iyfwrestling.com
@iyfwrestling
8 more pages per issue (48 to 56) is what I've read.
The change to quarterly shifts their nearly inevitable demise a little further into the future; to next year, if they're lucky.
Ron
The "parody" pieces were rarely funny but stuff like the "lighter side of..." was always quite decent.
If they had a daily "lighter side of" (or perhaps spy vs spy) online I'm sure they'd build up a decent following and stream for ad impressions. Comic magazines like Mad and Viz (British) are missing the electronic boat.
I record my sleeptalking
...
They should have canceled standard MAD and left MADkids and Classic MAD The problem with mad is that its gone stale, every joke is just a copy of a joke they used on another TV show that was based on another TV show. With MADkids they could have thrown in a fart toy (or something else vulgar), put the latest cartoon character on the cover and they were pretty much guaranteed sales. with MAD classics, they could have appealed to the die hard part of their audience thats been buying MAD for 50 years religiously.
This is really sad news. I've been reading Mad Magazine for the past 20 years aswell. I got my first Mad Mag when I was 8 years old and I've been reading them ever since. I hope they change their minds, I need my monthly Mad fix.
I didn't realise MAD was comedy. I thought it was aa American Current Affairs magzine.
I wonder if laptops and ebook readers will come with warnings like:
> Unplug and remove all batteries before using this device to toilet train your puppy.
Starting in April, huh? Just what would the First Day of April be?
but the eggplant over there.
Same here. It used to appear regularly on the newsstands here in the UK, and I used to read it avidly, but I've not seen it for over 20 years.
Quidnam Latine loqui modo coepi?
"Along w/MAD going quarterly after issue 500, our dental plan has been eliminated-so my idea of getting my missing tooth replaced is on hold!"
--- From http://twitter.com/AlfredENeuman (and I do have it from a good authority that it is the real Alfred E. Neuman.
--
# Canmephians for a better Linux Kernel
$Stalag99{"URL"}="http://stalag99.net";
They only put out 12 of those a year! Oh, wait...
That does it, I'm switching to "Cracked".
Brett
...I let my MAD subscription lapse a few months ago, more out of laziness than anything else.
There could have been more content, but what there was I still found pretty funny, at least the first few times around.
The compilation books of old stuff are still solid gold funny stuff; I received one yesterday
I listen to both RIAA and non-RIAA stuff if I like the music, tangential business/politics nonwithstanding.
was that MAD magazine stayed in publication even after National Lampoon stopped publishing its mag. I thought the Lampoon generally had much more sophisticated humor than MAD. In my opinion, MAD was more for the kids.
Of course, the movies put out since then by National Lampoon belie the "sophisticated" opinion I gave above, but the movies are not the same thing as their magazine. I watched a couple of their movies, and that was plenty. But I would buy their magazine again, if it were anything like the quality of old.
When I started reading MAD in the 50's ( shows my age! ) its cool sardonic madcap view of the world was unique, and a breath of fresh air in the stultifying climate of the times.
Now its outlook is mainstream, on shows such as SNL, on Jon Stewart's arched eyebrows.
It is hard for MAD to stand out in this environment.
Bookwormhole.net -- over 7000 published book reviews.
Perhaps Saturday Night Live should consider this approach.
What Would the Fab Five Do?
I loved Don Martin's stuff as a kid, but it's aged beyond relevance. Husbands don't come home and hang their business hat, (business hat??) and say, "Honeeeey, I'm Hoooome!" anymore. The whole psychological connection of the strip is lost. It didn't age well.
Spy vs Spy suffers from the same thing. The cold war is OVER. --Once brilliant, that strip is about as relevant and engaging today as Beetle Baily. (Which also once connected with people in a relevant way but which has become meaningless and prosaic.)
The only guy who still has the chops to fit today is Aragones. His "Side Lines" and basic style still shine.
I can't even remember any of the other guys doing stuff in Mad, but the collection of that bunch all at the same place and time was what floated Mad Magazine. The last issue I looked at, a couple of months ago as it happens, was just a bunch of re-tread attempts by no-name artists to copy old formulas.
It read the way the new Kermit sounds. False and without spark or meaning.
Sorry, but artistic collectives must die or change with their creators passing. The only way Mad could shine again would be if they hired on a bunch of luminary geniuses versed in comic observation and satire, (of the Jon Stewart caliber), who also happen to be able to draw in awesome, engaging styles. Not only that, but the editors would have to be willing to allow such new talent to re-invent the whole look of the magazine so that it reflected themselves. --Because anybody willing to copy a dead format and a dead style which last-gasped sometime around the 1980's is certainly not going to be particularly luminary. Any real genius would have been driven mad (ahem) over the restrictions and left asap.
And Intelligent cartoon satire hasn't vanished. There are new guys doing awesome things which don't try to be Kermit, but which are unique and genuinely exciting. XKCZ, for example, is fresh and new and. . , bloody cynical. (Imagine; there was a time when Beetle Baily was just as electric!) The big difference today is that the luminaries aren't all gathered in one convenient place anymore, and certainly not exclusively on paper. You have to go looking. --That's the part which I find most difficult. I enjoyed concentrations of work which I knew everybody else was experiencing. There was something tribal and culture-defining about it which I really drew energy from as a reader. These days, it's easy to feel disconnected.
Thank-goodness for Slashdot, eh?
-FL
Wow you folks have totally missed the boat.
This is nothing but an early April Fools joke.
For all you guys out there pining for the fjords, just go back and read some of those classic, black-and-white, pre-advertising MAD magazines. A lot of the material was *terrible*. I'm thinking particularly of the movie parodies. They were just frame after frame of bad pun or joke. But hey, at age 9, it makes you feel very grown up and rebellious to be reading such critical literature.
What you are experience is the nostalgia of youth. Watching an 80s transformers cartoon today, at my age, just doesn't invoke the sense of awesomeness it did when I was young. The cheesy plots, dialogue, ans sometimes crappy animation shine through.
Cracked magazine, however, seems to have come of age in the internet. The magazine always seemed like an un-funny knock off of mad magazine back in the day. Now, I find their online top-ten lists hilarious.
Computers are useless. They can only give you answers.
-- Pablo Picasso
...and can reproduce the same color, format size, and dot pitch of the average full color magazine.
Oh, and I won't care if I drop it or lose it rushing for my connection.
Kindle is a nice toy...but really...that's all it is so far.
Blar.
It was the original Star Wars (1977) edition. It wasn't too bad, but I realised I'd already grown out of it. I was 15.
Either they need new writers or better readers.
Mad Magazine wasn't a cheap laugh, they always had subtle depth.
Since that guy mentioned earlier (Don?) died, and they had Mad TV which seemed to be a cheap knock off of In Living Color (which was great) They started having color and advertizements!
I strongly suggest that they knock off color and advertisements and have a competition for better comic writer.
Yeah the price may need to go up.
The drawing styles of the new guys are lazy, computer drawn? without passion.
I rarely enjoyed the movie synopses. The political commentary and the regular features were great.
I have tremendous respect for Watterson (Calvin & Hobbes): he realized that he was running out of new stuff to say and quit. Peanuts (for example) took the opposite approach, traded on its fame, and turned into very sad and boring garbage for many years.
I read Mad cover to cover in the 60's and early 70's, at which point it turned into crap for the amusement of semiliterate 11 year olds. I can't blame them for wanting to stay in business, though I wish they'd had the integrity to accept a dignified end when society deteriorated too far to appreciate what Mad was. I feel deprived of the chance to mourn for an old friend who languished for years in a nursing home rather than going out with dignity, continence, and decent hygiene.
This is my fault. I JUST subscribed for 2 years and was giddy about it. I've not had a subscription to MAD since the 70s. The universe could have me being happy of something so simple so it decided to poostab! I might need to get a crack subscription to get me thru!
I think they should open source it, see what happens.
The real deal with mad magazine was that you had youths with ambition intelligence and wit driving the magazine, a safe-haven for pondering not just silliness but the big things that were going on (with silliness).
To me the magazine was never something i knew was filled with humor, it was filled with brilliant art, where the whole page wasn't just the frame, but alot more than that.
Today it's doesn't have the same punch, probably because you don't have young artistic minds with a desire to express themselves, you have artists drawing to a script, artists who use the same well-known format and imitate that over and again.
Back in the day, a paper and pencil was all you could get your hand on, today youtube is doing what Mad did back in the day (I point at the crazy german kid as one example).
You can either go where the young people are, and do what they're doing, or you can recapture the people who enjoyed Mad comics in the past, and go for what they care for, which is alot more adult, and alot more gritty, and alot more personal than what you sometimes see.
Good luck to them, I hope they can survive.
I like to contribute to the Slashdot stream-of-consciousness as much as the next person, but it's tough to carry this one:
MAD Magazine reducing publication --> magazines going to e-magazines --> taking laptops into the bathrooms --> Irritable Bowel Syndrome
Maybe I'll just jump onto the next thread...