Mad Magazine - "What... me worry?"

[neger psykolog]

Mad magazine was a comedic, satirical and silly comic/magazine series that lasted through many iterations and many generations of modern Western culture. It has been referenced in plenty of modern TV shows and magazines yet never had an extreme level of fame - it didn't seem to take itself seriously enough for that, and that is what made it enjoyable.

Alfred E Neuman (the "what... me worry?" guy) became a prolific cultural "meme" and his face was widely plastered all over the place and on almost every Mad Magazine cover. The goofy looking kid was totally fictitious and was an endearing invention - to me he was sort of a protolo-lolcow with the silly face and caption (sort of like putting a picture of Terry Davis or King Cobra) - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alfred_E._Neuman

Many a writer, musician, director and k-farms poster would've read them as a kid, or as an adult. Sometimes it was political, sometimes it was cultural and it was always hit or miss but when it hit it was seriously funny. It looked at things very often with a highly stupid and snarky lens, providing a cynical look at the world.

Basically every Mad Magazine would have a sort of easter egg called the "fold in" on the last page - these were infamous and I still have no idea how the artists/writers behind Mad came up with these. They were truly ingenious and once you folded it in you'd usually get quite an unpredictably different concept.


They experimented with many different formats and ideas, even going so far as to make a TV pilot that never aired:

And there was also a TV show that no one really cared about: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mad_(TV_series)

Links

• The Internet Archive copy of a bunch of magazines: https://archive.org/details/mad-magazine-1-500_202306

 

[MrTroll]

 

[oldTireWater]

I know more about movies from the 70's and 80's from reading the Mad Satires than I do from seeing the actual movies.

Sergio Aragones was Mads best artist (and he did Groo).

 

[XYZpdq Jr.]

I grew up reading Mad, like back issues going back to the fifties. BIG influence on my life, my dad taught me their ethos that yes mocking everything but make sure you include yourself
I got to visit their offices once back in the day when Gaines was still alive. Their offices were cool. Basically EVERY fucking prop from the photo covers or pieces was lurking somewhere, like the rock from this, the giant hypo needle, pretty sure the AEN statue was the one from Up The Academy

 

[spacko]

this might be a fake memory but there was one edition of mad magazine where the fold in was a tatted up nazi and when you folded it in the swastika tattoos turned into square flowers so as a like 8 or 9 year old kid and for years after when i was doodling in schoolbooks and stuff i would draw swastikas and then square them off and turn them into flowers and then one day i played wolfenstein 3d and just started drawing swastikas and thats how i became a nazi

not really i just got into really big trouble from my mum who didnt even explain why i was in trouble but she was right to punish me because ignorance of the holocaust is no excuse for antisemitism

e: well that was 2 hours well spent i am a dirty filthy lying liar it wasnt the fold-in but halfway through the mag



(issue #310)



33 years later he's still not wrong

 

[Dagoth AMOGUS]

Fining one of those next to the toilet was like finding the golden ticket in Willy Wonka

 

[ShahOfIran1979]

I thought you were making a lolcow thread on Neuman.

 

[MerriedxReldnahc]

Apparently the secret rule of drawing Alfred E. Newman is that his eyes are out of line with each other!

I love MAD, there were such phenomenal artists involved over the years. Mort Drucker is an excellent artist to learn from if you wanna draw good likenesses among so many other people. The magazine itself has an interesting origin story, iirc it's basically what was left of EC Comics after the Comics Code bullshit destroyed them back in the 50's. (10 Cent Plague by David Hajdu is a great book on that time period if you wanna learn more.)

 

[GloryHole Stalker]

Apparently the secret rule of drawing Alfred E. Newman is that his eyes are out of line with each other!

I love MAD, there were such phenomenal artists involved over the years. Mort Drucker is an excellent artist to learn from if you wanna draw good likenesses among so many other people. The magazine itself has an interesting origin story, iirc it's basically what was left of EC Comics after the Comics Code bullshit destroyed them back in the 50's. (10 Cent Plague by David Hajdu is a great book on that time period if you wanna learn more.)

If you read Seduction Of The Innocent by Dr. Frederic Wertham (which kicked off kerfuffle that did EC (and horror crime comics in general).... I think that book says a lot more about him than the kids he "studied".