Both pieces are a reaction to the news that Mad will no longer produce new material, but will instead recycle its old content. Sort of like a greatest hits offering. Apparently, Mad is no longer as popular as it once was with the male, teenage wiseass who is crashing through puberty. The publisher is hemorrhaging money.
Both authors are noticeably younger than myself. Bruce Handy and Tim Kreider credit Mad for way more things than ever occurred to me when I read it in the '50s and early '60s. Of the two, Mr. Kreider in the NYT (perhaps fittingly) appears to be the most serious, crediting 'Mad' that..."behind all the adolescent satire and parody was a moral agenda."
Both Mr. Kreider and Mr. Hardy are writers, so of course having now grown up they can recognize what the grownups who were producing 'Mad' were all about. But believe me, reading 'Mad' when you're 11- or 12-years-old, you wouldn't know a moral agenda from a German Shepherd.
Both writers have some distinctive memories of the 'Mad' magazine content. Interesting, both recall the parody of Edward Gorey's "The Gashlycrumb Tinies" where Gorey, composing a macabre line of poetry for each drawing of a child he makes for every letter of the alphabet, works his way through the alphabet with couplets like: 'K is for Kate who was struck by an axe...L is for Leo who swallowed some tacks.
'Mad' apparently updated the rhymes with current childhood dangers that reflect the era of school shootings and active shooter drills, something my guess is Handy and Kreider grew up with, just as much as I grew up with the threat of nuclear annihilation and "Duck and Cover." drills. Q is for Quinn whose life has just begun...R is for Reid, valued less than a gun."
There have always been dangers lurking as you grow up. Not the same dangers, but ones that will nevertheless snuff out your life.
Aside from my memories of 'Mad' and its various regular features, especially 'Spy vs. Spy,' I will forever remember the 1961 issue whose cover showed us that 1961 is still 1961, even if you turn it upside down!
This was fantastic. What other year could you do the same thing with? It turns out 1881 is a good one. But the pickings are slim. The next upside-down-is-the-same-year after 1961 will be 6009, a year so far in the future you might conceivably be concerned that no one will ever see it. Or at least still be collecting Social Security benefits.
Can anyone tell me what NYC Subway line is depicted on 'Mad' magazine's cover? Or at least on the cover of the issues I would be reading at Siegal's Candy store in Flushing without paying for the issue? Look closely. There is a character jumping out of the M pointing to the IND line. The what?
Years ago my boss, who was several years younger than me and not from NYC, loved it when I explained to him that the NYC subway was once run by three private companies, known by their abbreviations as the IND, the Independent system; the BMT, the Brooklyn Manhattan Trains; and the IRT, Interborough Rapid Transit.
Each company had their own railroad standards, thus the gauge for each company's tracks was different, thereby preventing an IND car from ever rolling on an IRT track, etc. Just some of the baked-in incompatibilities of the current system that it is stuck with forever.
But learning is not always a one-way street. I will forever remember Rob telling how the western part of a town usually had the better homes than the eastern part of time. Rob, who grew up outside of Hartford, CT, with remnants of New England factories still dotting his landscape, explained that with smokestacks, and prevailing winds, soot would blow to the east of the smokestacks, leaving that part of town with dirty wash hung on the line, and therefore, a less desirable place to live. The swells lived west of the smokestacks.
Mr. Hardy credits 'Mad' magazine with leading him not to do so well in school, thus precipitating parental intervention when his grades started to slip. He feels his new found adolescent attention to the magazine caused his attention to wonder, causing him not to apply himself so well in school.
As for myself, I can't say reading 'Mad' caused any parental intervention. Bur my own reading habits didn't escape some parental worrying when the show 'The Untouchables' was popular on television, the story of Eliot Ness cleaning up the Capone-era gangsters in Chicago.
I became smitten with stories of gangsters. I bought a cheap paperback, complete with photos that gave little biographies of the bad boys and girls of the 30s, generally Al Capone, John Dillinger, Bonnie and Clyde, Pretty Boy Floyd, etc. I read the Wanted Posters in the Office. (They really did put them there once upon a time.)
I loved reading about the names of the prisons they were sent to. I tucked the book between the mattress and the box spring in my room, only to have the book discovered, and the worry begin, when the mattress was flipped.
Mom and dad were still around as I got old enough and didn't become a gangster. When the 'Sopranos' was ever-so popular, I was watching something else. I couldn't care less about those guys.
We all move on.
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