L's Reviews > The MAD Files: Writers and Cartoonists on the Magazine that Warped America's Brain!: A Library of America Special Publication

Dispatches from aliens

I was born in 1955 and grew up a nice White Anglo-Saxon Protestant kid in a nice White Anglo-Saxon Protestant family in a small town in New Hampshire. The Usual Gang of Idiots who produced MAD magazine were a bunch of scruffy New York Jews who had heard Yiddish all their lives. I could not have been less aware of that environment if MAD had been coming from a planet in the Andromeda Galaxy.

One way in which The Usual Gang was alien to me was that they read comic books and pulp magazines regularly. You've read the stories from Famous Creative People about how they used to wait outside the convenience store with lolling tongues waiting for the next issue of Marvel comics or MAD or Astounding, which they snapped up immediately. That was not me, because (1) I am not a Famous Creative People, and (2) I didn't have any cash. Paying 40 cents eight times a year for the latest issue of MAD was as far beyond my fiscal powers as buying a new yacht eight times a year.

And yet, I read comics, and MAD. Like many of the contributors to this collection of essays, I just found issues of MAD lying around -- in places my family stayed, in the homes of my friends (even though they were as impecunious as me).

They were... WEIRD ... They were really, really funny, except when they were entirely incomprehensible. Even with my very limited exposure, and even though I stopped encountering MAD in the wild at the age of 11, when my family moved to a new state, MAD left a mark on me.

Although I knew nothing of The Usual Gang, they knew me. They knew I watched I Love Lucy, Leave it to Beaver, Ozzie and Harriet, and My Three Sons, along with all their slick commercials. (The Madison Avenue Suits who made those commercials were a culture as unknown to eleven-year-old me as The Usual Gang, but they also knew me and talked to me.) MAD existed to skewer me and my world.

It didn't quite work -- It's hard to write or draw a take-down of water that a fish can get. But I got enough of it to be broadened (the way a loaf of bread is broadened by a streamroller) and amused.

The MAD Files: Writers and Cartoonists on the Magazine that Warped America's Brain!: A Library of America Special Publication, is a collection of essays (mostly -- there are a few comics) edited by David Mikics. Some of the authors contributed to MAD themselves -- more are artists who were influenced by MAD. To hear them tell it, MAD was foundational and fundamental to American show business. It might even be true.

I mostly enjoyed this. Occasional essays veered toward the snootily academic, but most were loving portraits of the extraordinary artists who made MAD and the extraordinary art they produced. Also, it stimulated me to dig up some collections of old MADs that are listed in a brief bibliography, e.g. MAD About the 50's. I will see whether they still take 68-year-old me anything like they did 11-year-old me.

I thank Edelweiss and Library of America for an advance reader copy of The MAD Files: Writers and Cartoonists on the Magazine that Warped America's Brain!: A Library of America Special Publication.

Blog review.