I had a couple of the books. Each cartoon had two or three answers and a blank word balloon to write your own in. Mine always sucked.
RIP to a legend. Fold-ins were both unique and a surprisingly versatile medium for satire.
(At least Sergio Aragones is still with us, at the comparatively youthful age of 85!)
This one hurts. Like @HumanTon said, Sergio Aragones is now the last of the greats.
Always loved this photo of Al Jaffee as a kid with fellow Mad legend, Bill Elder.
Dick DeBartolo is the other golden era of MAD cartoonist left, I think.
Not to be pedantic, but he’s a writer, not a cartoonist, isn’t he? Also, he didn’t start writing for Mad until 1961. Anything past the Harvey Kurtzman era (which ends at 1956) is Silver Age Mad, according to my reckoning!
Total shock. Too young, dammit.
Fold-in is an epic tribute to him.
D’oh! You’re right, DeBartolo is a writer only. Still an integral part of that crew with Don Martin, Prohias, Dave Berg, Jack Davis, Aragones, Drucker, etc. etc. But yep, not a cartoonist.
Man, for me Kurtzman-era MAD is paleolithic. :) Thanks to having much older brothers, late 1970’s 10-year-old me inherited every MAD from late 1958 through 1970. (And a bunch of the paperbacks collections too.) And even as late as 1960 and early 1961, a lot of the magazine was set up like anthology comics that were MAD’s original DNA – you’d get 3 or 4 long-form parody stories in an issue, and none of the one-pagers from Martin or Prohias or shorter form stuff like “The Lighter Side of…”
To me the golden era started towards the end of the Kennedy administration, when they figured out, two long-form parodies (but even shortened those considerably), one at the front, one at the end of the magazine, and then shorter stuff in between.
I hear you. I was born in 1979, and I can still name my first issue of Mad Magazine, which I memorized cover to cover. That’s a Dick DeBartolo cover story, if I’m not mistaken.
So I do love that crew. But shortly after this, my Dad introduced me to real Mad, by buying me this boxset of the Kurtzman run. And while I’m very fond of Mad Magazine , the Kurtzman run (especially the first half) really is the peak. Stories like Superduperman have been acknowledged as culturally significant by the Smithsonian for a reason.
I think most of later Mad fits into an anti-humor category, with the exception of some core geniuses (like Jaffee, Don Martin, Antonio Prohas and Sergio Aragones) who really elevated it by their contributions. Like I said, I’m super fond of it. But I think objectively, Mad peaked pretty early.
Jaffee was a Mad genius. His stuff, along with Don Martin’s, just wrecked me when i was a kid.
Rest in Power.
MAD was a big part of my youth. It introduced me to edgy, often surprisingly thoughtful social satire.
I used to ride my bicycle down to the local store and buy Mad every time it came out. I wish I had kept them. I did buy the compendium when it came out.
I remember being afraid my parents would find them inappropriate and take them away. So I hid them in the bottom of my dresser.
A few years later, early teens, the same applied to National Lampoon. Hidden away! But oh so great.
I was too young to appreciate all of the jokes, but my parents understood the real power of MAD Magazine. If I made sure that myself and my brother were well behaved in the grocery store, my mother would buy me the latest issue. See also Cracked.