MAD Magazine to end

David_D

This news all started breaking last night (which feels like, if this is all true, they timed the announcement to be a holiday news dump) that MAD Magazine will soon cease publication, first of new material, and as a monthly magazine overall. This will be the first time it is off newsstands after a 67 year run.

Hollywood Reporter
The Beat
Fortune
Blog post from Mark Evanier

mwhitt80

That's sad news.

Brack

Evanier is right in his assessment. The fact the Beano has increased readers for 3 years running, shows you can produce a kid's humour magazine that will grow an audience.

Ironically, the Beano's now defunct sister comic the Dandy may show where MAD's problem lay - the traditional MAD Magazine formula.

In its dying days the Dandy started to rely on pop-culture parodies much in the way MAD had done.

SharkJumper

I've been buying it since the relaunch (and liking it) and have been picking out the occasional back issues. MAD was my early beginnings before buying comics.

I'm sure it will be back in some form. It had a good run and I'll miss it. Just another jumping OFF point for me and today's comics, sadly.

kayrmf

The cartoonist Derf had an interesting tweet series yesterday about this.

He claimed the title was selling around 150,000 an issue and is being pulled by the Warners parent company AT and T as they want no satire involvement whatsoever as they lobby very hard on Capitol Hill.

By extension he argued that ALL print titles from DC were under threat as it was a business model that AT and T were not going to back long term at all despite some R and D benefits for character and brand creation through Warners for use in other media, games, toys, tv and movies etc.

Sadly I can see this happening. The end of MAD - and I enjoyed Bill Morrison's relaunch very much - can be viewed in the context of Vertigo ending last week and other DC decisions that limit the diversity of their output and as @SharkJumper rightly says another jumping off point which both major companies seem to really like to provide.

The decision last week by Disney to end production of a Mouse Guard movie is also worrying. Perhaps Disney will not be involved in any product they do not 100% own the rights to so backing a major film release from an independent publisher was a no-no. Very sad and very short-sighted.

SharkJumper

I imagine MAD could have been pricier to make with so many creators involved.

Unfortunately, with Disney, they are owning more and more of the IPs and entertainment products out there. There use to be the cry of "Monopoly!" a couple decades ago with these things. Now, everyone just thinks of the cool mash ups that can be done between 20th Century Fox and Disney. There might be room for independent creations from Eric Powell's proposed satire magazine to indy film makers but it still comes down to who owns the delivery system and a bigger healthier revenue stream to finance those pricier endeavors.

Does anyone know when Disney's early IPs are due for public domain? I imagine we'll be seeing new legislation extensions soon for that or perhaps an "in perpetuity" proposal.

nweathington

"Steamboat Willie" has hit public domain, but only the cartoon, not the characters obviously.

Hex

This news makes me just as sad as the demise of some of my favourite celebrities over the past couple of years. I can't say I'm surprised... print publication is a tough go these days, but to see MAD magazine disappear just feels so wrong. Not that I have purchased an issue in years, but I have so many happy childhood memories of swapping copies of MAD with my pals. I recall begging my Grandmother to buy me a copy during a trip to the drug store (it had a floppy vinyl record inside!), she was hesitant, and MAD was a hard sell, but I eventually won out. I reread that magazine so many times it eventually fell apart.

I'll have to pick up an issue for old times sake.

[Deleted User]

MAD, in truth, has been on life support for the past 10 (more likely 20) years.

I started reading MAD when I was 9, in 1977. It was something my parents would buy for me (after all, my dad grew up reading it). It was clever, biting, and subversive. All of the political commentary went over my head, but I understood most of the rest. My parents would buy it, but I would hesitate to let them read it. It felt subversive enough that I felt like I was getting away with something. They were relentless, making fun of everyone and everything. The magazine stayed fresh through the 80s, but I outgrew it by the 90s, and when I picked it up again, later, it was in color, and had ads. What was clever and satirical, had now become crass and gross, adopting a Beavis and Butthead type of sensibility. The creators had always referred to themselves as "The usual gang of idiots", but I felt they had been replaced by real idiots. I bought reprint volumes for my son.

The ads were a compromise that betrayed the very foundation of the magazine. Before, it was beholden to no one, save the editor. Suddenly, it was in a "don't bite the hand that feeds you" situation. And how can you make fun of the crass manipulation of Madison Avenue on one page, when there is a Capri Sun ad on the next.

And recently, the me-too, political-correctness, nation-of-the-offended culture doesn't exactly welcome satire or parody. It's pretty difficult to do a satire magazine in a climate where Trump is the only thing you can make fun of without the PC police coming down on you.

Brack

Tonebone said:

And recently, the me-too, political-correctness, nation-of-the-offended culture doesn't exactly welcome satire or parody. It's pretty difficult to do a satire magazine in a climate where Trump is the only thing you can make fun of without the PC police coming down on you.

1500 issues of Private Eye say different.

And pop culture is loaded to the brim with satire and parody right now. To the point where there may be too much. Any joke MAD magazine makes will have been beaten to the punch by a comedian on twitter or teenager on TikTok.