Speaking of Don Martin, has anyone ever seen his early Mad work? A lot darker than the goofy sound effect work (ie, the cartoon where a guy feeds pigeons arsenic-laded popcorn).

I'm a really big MAD magazine fan. In fact, I was reading an old late '60s issue just last night!

I first encountered MAD in the early '80s at age 11 or so, when my best friend was gifted a huge box of back issues stretching from the mid-70s to the early '80s by a kindly uncle. We loved those issues and thought they were absolutely hilarious. We started to buy MAD off of the newsagents shelves soon after, around early 1984 or so, I guess. I also began picking up secondhand copies of the MAD paperback books, which reprinted older stuff from the '50s and '60s. My favourite parts of the magazine were usually the movie or TV satires drawn by Mort Drucker or Angelo Torres, the "Lighter Side of..." strips by Dave Berg, Al Jaffee's "Snappy Answers to Stupid Questions", and the Spy Vs. Spy strip.

As far as I'm concerned, the magazine's heyday was a roughly 20 year period from the mid-60s through to the mid-80s. Myself, I was still reading in it well into the early 90s, but it's hard not to feel that it was something of a spent force by then. In a lot of ways, The Simpsons had taken over the job of subverting America and the UK's impressionable youth with hilarious wit, needle sharp satire and well-founded cynicism by then.

I've spoken a number of times in this forum about how, as I've gotten older, I've become increasingly aware of how encountering MAD as a pre-teen has shaped my character, personality, political views and general distrust of authority as an adult. It was potent stuff for a child!

EDIT: The first issue I bought new from the newsagent's shop was the British issue #265...

Why can't they? (It's a great cover, BTW)

Sick was decent when Bob Powell was the art director for a couple of years just before he started working for Marvel. No idea how it hung on for another decade after that.


Here's a song I memorized from Mad sometime in the 60s:

It's a grand old smog
It's a low-lying smog
You can tell by the smell and the pall

Though it clouds the skies
And burns our eyes
It means there's employment for all

For it comes, you see
From some great factory
Where there's never an idle cog

So don't give up
Our way of life
And give thanks for that grand old smog

The best part of Mort and Angelo's stuff is that they made sure to draw the main characters close to the actors, but would have fun and get goofier with background characters or background gags. Kind of made an interesting contrast.

Drucker was such a master of the caricature, and--in accordance with the scripts--knew how to capture reactions just as well as the performers his work was based on, and his having characters break the fourth wall right at some insane moment was flawless humor illustration at work.