Mad was doing fine, but I think the reality is that it’s owned by a giant media conglomerate now and it probably wasn’t profitable enough for them. A small company with a will to persist can adapt and adjust and deal with slow periods. a subsidiary is probably seen as dead weight.
that’s just a guess. I was working as a colorist for mad for a few years, but my editor was kicked to the curb when the corporate overlords decided to move operations to california. I feel like New York was Mad’s soul and that was a huge mistake. Nothing against the new team though. they were actually hiring a lot of younger good writers and artists who would have kept the thing alive if someone hadn’t pulled the plug on them.
I will always love MAD. I feel like it’s a part of me. I still have a whole bunch of MAD paperbacks and a couple boxes of MADs from the 70s in my house.
I almost bought a yearly subscription for my little ones when I read that Mad was back. In the end I didn’t and maybe that’s a good thing since I would have lost the money. OTOH, if I had subscribed maybe they wouldn’t have folded. Darn.
They actually did start printing real ads in the magazine, at least for a while there. But yeah, sad to see it go. I still read it at the library occasionally, and have a bunch of back issues.
I just subscribed for the first time ever. I remember reading my dad’s Mad and Cracked magazines when I was a kid. Cracked seems to have made the digital transition, Mad not so much. But at least I’ll have a few physical copies to remember the passing of an era.
For many years, Cracked was a really, really good website. It had great articles, biting political commentary, scathing satire, and a great YouTube presence as well.
After getting acquired by Scripps, it went downhill really quickly. All their best content producers got fired or quit, there became a greater emphasis on user-generated content (which is largely just photoshopped images with text), and content got more and more sanitized. (These days all “objectionable” language is auto-censored whether it makes sense or not.)
About the only good writer left is Seanbaby and even his stuff is very infrequent.
It’s a real disappoinment to see it drop so far from what it once was. I still read it every day but it’s just not the same.
Somehow I just can’t take my phone to the toilet (a personal thing, not an externally imposed rule of any kind), so I still have a use for magazines.
(And those who don’t read on the can are alien android people, just in case that was part of any answer.)
Just got some of my ancient archived stuff out of my mother’s house, and one of the things I saved was the issue with the Nixon/Agnew ‘The Sting’ cover!
A huge influence in my life. MAD in its height was Adbusters with more humor and variety. I cancelled my subscription within the hour of receiving the first magazine in 2001 that had 3rd-party ads. On a side-note: I wouldn’t read Boing Boing if I didn’t have an adblocker, and I do not feel that MAD now or The Onion or Boing Boing can really be comparable so long as they rely on ads.
MAD went against the whole publishing industry norm by rejecting ads, and for decades it was perhaps the most substantial push against that sort of corporate world that existed.
I still have boxes of magazines and books etc.
It took me years to realize that MAD had given me a perspective on modern civilization that most of my peers just don’t have.
I haven’t read it in years, but it’s sad to see it come to its demise. What possibly replaces it? Not the snarky online memes on social media.
