Now I Got Worry: MAD Magazine Ends 67 Year Print Run

It was MAD Magazine, along with the Bill Apter wrestling magazines, that made me a better reader when I was a kid.

I have been poring through MAD since I was 9 years old, and it’s always been such an amazing source of humor and current events told in the most irreverent way by some of the comic book artists ever. Mort Drucker. Don Martin. Sergio Aragones. Al Jaffe. Dave Berg. These were the men who helped shape my perception of the world as I entered my tweens.

And while my own tastes as a reader segued into the music magazines that helped shape my professional future, I always took a moment to peruse MAD at the mag rack of my local Tower Records or Waldenbooks, forever chuckling at the way by which they took the piss out of whatever pop act was hot at the moment.

Going through Google images last night after the news broke across the Internet, I found a few covers and pages from MAD that proves there was no more of a sharper, funnier or more pointed critic of the critics than the Usual Gang of Idiots. And while MAD isn’t going away altogether as it transitions into a digital only thing, we pay homage to yet another treasured print magazine lost to someone else’s idea of progress.

VIDEO: The MAD disco record!

VIDEO: The MAD Magazine TV Special 1974