Once every year or two I go through my MAD magazines and comics and enjoy the range of talent in their pages. An issue of MAD from any era is like a time capsule of whatever was dominant politically and culturally in the time it was published.
And also amazing is how MAD, like no other part of the comics industry, kept the same assembly of talent for over 40 years of publication from roughly 1960-2000, and then some.
Mort Drucker, Dave Berg, Antonio Prohias, Sergio Aragones, Al Jaffee, Frank Jacobs, George Woodbridge, Jack Rickard, Jack Davis, Paul Coker, Angelo Torres, Kelly Freas, Norman Mingo, and so many others. For all these creators to stay with MAD so long, it must have been a great place to work.
MAD walked a fine line, with a sense of humor making somewhat serious commentary about the insanity of our world and culture. At various times my favorite has gone back and forth between talents like Prohias, Aragones, Drucker, Coker, Jaffee and the like. Even under the guise of humor, MAD was enlightening, giving a greater awareness of the adult world, and training the reader in their late adolescent years to take a cynical eye and sense of humor to the official message being fed to the public on any given issue.
Growing up, it was a fun introduction to the more complicated political and cultural world outside of mainstream comics. Although I began reading comics in 1972, I began reading MAD within months of that. The first issue I specifically recall was 157, the March 1973 issue, cover-featuring their parody of all 4 of the
Planet of the Apes movies up to that point. "The Planet that went Ape"!
My favorite line I can think of offhand was during "Conquest", where Caesar leads the apes against the human army to take over the world, and outgunned, he uses a secret strategy of laying out 10,000 banana peels to knock the human army off their feet to defeat them.
Also good was the end of the "Beneath the Planet that went Ape" parody, where Taylor (Charleton Heston) is trying to stop the apes from blowing up the doomsday bomb, until Doctor Zaius says that if they survive they'll have to do another sequel, at which point Taylor grabs the self destruct and blows up the earth!
I have scattered issues going back to 1955, and reprints of several of the original comic book MAD issues, including a Millennnium Edition reprint of MAD number 1. And I have a complete run of MAD from 1969-1977, the era I enjoyed the most, with a lot of scattered issues and MAD SPECIAL issues after that.
So... what are some of your favorite runs and features in MAD?
