Mad Magazine and Snake
Mad Magazine is dead.
When I was a kid, my parents and sister and I would kill afternoons at the library in Centerpoint but sometimes at Coles, a middling chain bookstore at Merivale Mall, in Ottawa, where I grew up. I don't remember many of the visits but I remember one. I was nine. We split up and I was crouching down in the humor section looking at Calvin and Hobbes, of which I owned one book but wanted more. I caught the trade paperbacks on the bottom shelf, which were small books with colorful spines and cartoony lettering. They were short and an inch off the floor and a shelf lower than Herman and Doonesbury. One book's cover had on it an overweight man in glasses with a cigar, shrugging. He looked worried and was dressed like a parishioner from the synagogue my parents and I belonged to, a doctor (GP) who'd sometimes wear a three-piece powder blue suit to services and who was in his 50s with a full head of red hair. The book next to it was bright green and on it there was a kid with a round face, smiling, not worried, a tooth missing, maybe laughing at me, laughing at something. A third book jumped out at me more than the other two. Two men in suits, facing each other, simply drawn, fewer lines on this cover than the other two. The men were both short and had long pointy faces that made up most their body lengths. One was dressed in black and one in white and each hid bombs behind their backs with fuses lit. It was by a guy named Prohias, which was a word I didn't understand and which sounded like nothing I had heard before like Regis Philbin or Walt Disney. How was this a name? I understood the cover, and wanted it. Spy vs. Spy in a huge font, deco-like, flat, fat letters. I leafed through it. The book was mostly cartoons, black and white unlike the cover, but it was awesome, and so violent. These two funny little guys didn't speak but ran around foreign-looking cities (restaurants with tables outside, pointy cars, rivers) trying to kill each other however they could, and lived. Their arched faces jumped out at me and I wanted to have them around. I would be similarly moved a decade later by the Nike Cortez, which was the first purposeful Nike I bought with my own money.
I picked up Prohias' book and walked over to my dad, who was by PC Magazines. I showed him what I had and which I wanted. We walked down the aisle over to Mad Magazine, an issue that maybe Dean Cain was on the cover of. We were more of a library than a bookstore family, but when my dad said no to the book, it made my stomach twist, even though I expected it. "We have Mad Magazines at home," he said. It was a line I heard before and which never meant any good. "A lot of them."
I remember when we got home I right away went to the basement and turned it upside down. I moved the big for-Israel suitcases and duffel bags away from the meat freezer and the drying rack from the space in front of the big raw wood shelves that provided storage in our unfinished basement. On the shelf, behind bags and a box of broken toys were four or five big cardboard Benson and Hedges boxes, the kind that hold 12 or 24 cartons. I was not sure how I had not seen them before, or noticed that they were for cigarettes either. I ripped one open. Inside the first box was maybe 100 Mad Magazines, in pristine condition, with the covers, and a Spy vs. Spy page or two in each one. On one cover the smiling boy was standing against a tree, wearing Lederhosen, with an apple tied to his head, and an arrow hurtling towards him. In another he was holding a bunch of balloons with presidential candidates, only one of which I recognized, in one hand, and a needle in the other. Some older, smaller issues were interspersed, the size of the trade paperbacks, several with scary monsters on the cover, and gore inside. I moved the box to the middle of the basement floor where I'd ride my bike in the winter and whip tennis balls against the wall. I went to the index and looked for Spy. Vs. Spy and read the two pages. I threw the magazine on the ground and opened up another one and read the Spy. vs. Spy pages and did it again. There were more than I could keep up with. I don't think I ever felt like I had a lot of stuff as a kid, but I did that afternoon. I kept leafing through them. I knew these had to last so I took only about 10 out of the Benson and Hedges box and lugged them to my room. I put them in my closet in a pile under my bookshelf, which was then full of books about Maurice Richard and the value of tenacity, detective novels, Upper Deck football and O-Pee-Chee baseball cards. The Benson and Hedges boxes were for cigarettes my mom smoked, I would later learn. She quit the habit shortly after meeting my dad.
The first issue I remember reading cover to cover was number 135, June 1970. On the cover it said Sleazy Riders, a satire of Easy Rider (USA 1969), the road movie directed by Dennis Hopper and starring Peter Fonda, who was riding a chopper next to that funny kid with the gap in his teeth, Alfred E. Neumann. That summer, maybe the one after, my sister and parents and I went on a trip to New York City and I brought 15 or 20 issues with me. They made up half my luggage. One issue I remember reading on that trip was Mad Salutes the Energy Crisis, where on the cover was that phrase in big neon, a massive sign atop an apartment building, and a very small Alfred E. plugging the sign in somewhere. I asked my dad what the energy crisis was and he told me. I also asked him who were on the political balloons. I asked him who Don Martin and Dave Berg were and why our TV didn't get Room 222. I learned my dad collected every single issue of Mad Magazine that was published, starting in 1954, two years after Mad started and the year Sports Illustrated began, to which he had a charter subscription as well. He collected those issues until 1977, which was two years before he met my mom. His mom, my grandma, had maybe 50 issues in a similar box in her Seattle apartment. I only got to read those over an afternoon. Most of them my dad had, though, and they made their way to Canada, and to me. This all happened when I was 9, same age he was when he started.
If I was indoors I was reading those magazines cover to cover. I wasn't allowed to write in them and I did only once, at the bottom of a page in some issue or another when I absolutely needed to remember how the word masochist, new to me, was pronounced. A year in, every cover was off the issue, worn through the staples, and most by this point were missing their middle pages. My friend Avi, who I was close to, stopped hanging out with me for a year because he was sick of the magazines. He'd come over and we'd go outside and play baseball for three hours and then we'd go read Mads for two. He didn't like reading the magazines and I started playing baseball more often with my friend Mike, who didn't mind the magazines and would look at my baseball cards while I read or would just get into trouble. My dad didn't let me fold the back covers in at first. None of his had the back covers folded in, which I am just realizing now. Eventually I folded some in, never evenly enough, and never if the covers fell off. So that is to say not many.
I'd go to Shoppers down the block and would sometimes leaf through current issues, the Deep Space Nine guy on the cover, feeling betrayed to see Dave Berg covering the lighter side of many things and Don Martin decamped to Cracked. It is depressing the magazine is over. I guess no one knows how to make real money in media anymore. Except for The Daily Racing Form and some pay Texas Longhorns messageboards, every place is doing badly, or worse off than they were three years ago (in the case of new media properties with venture funding) or 13 years ago (in the case of legacy media organizations). I have not read an issue that is not older than me in my life, and I am not surprised Mad is gone. It doesn't make it hurt any less. Something very important, I think the best and most forceful magazine there was, is gone.
I can't think of much they got wrong. Lots of people think of Mad as a dumb satire magazine full of Jewish jokes, which it was. I don't think Jewish humor is very funny. It felt more than that. The magazine never took ads — think about that — and were agnostic, at best, about every institution. Most journalistic entities can (should) be depended on to be distrustful and skeptical of any group of people making decisions, but Mad was disrespectful. This backbone was complented by humor both simple and visual, which softened the contempt for organized power they clearly had. What a great thing for a kid to discover. To this day I can't think anything else in the mainstream world that stood for things like they did. Of course, I was a child, and uncritical of the magazine I read and loved. But they took stands. In Mad, cigarettes, alcohol, television, drugs, diets, politicians ... their own selves .. were transparent money grabs. I think sometimes Mad had more of an effect on me than the records I bought a few years after.
Mad wasn't perfect: the gay jokes weren't cool, they put a wall up between themselves and women, and they could be mean to people just being themselves. But Mad mostly took on either dumb or big targets, and was never severe or superior. Reading the magazine made it seem like you weren't really being taught anything. And yet... here was how the world really worked: no one at the top impressive at all, most full of shit, most adults not fans of each other, fueled by money and insecurity and small thoughts. The nice thing about Mad was you always felt in on the joke, an important thing for a 10-year-old getting the rug pulled out from under him by being forced to grow up. Even when the joke was 30 years older than you and about something in a different country. How else to understand how things really worked than to read, in my room, about The Lighter Side of Air Conditioning, or Room 222 (Room 2222Zzzzzzzzz......), or to preview the Democratic debates of 1968? What could be more universal than getting something out of these stories?
Mad had a 67 year run, which is longer than a lot of baseball careers. I don't play or work in baseball anymore, and my grandmother's apartment is shuttered and the issues that were at my parents' house are gone. My friend Avi is living in Vancouver and I haven't seen him since college, and my other friend Mike passed away in high school. I did the math and on August 3 of this year, he'll be gone longer than he was here. Nothing really stays the same, or even stays. Possessions are fleeting. T-shirts and magazines (and books and musical instruments and heirlooms and statement jewelry and jadeite Fire King and non-microwaveable Nike mugs and chipped George Nelson credenzas and used sweatpants and metal necklaces featuring Indian thunderbirds and foam-soled Nikes and good haircuts) are never owned, not forever, but rented from the void. It doesn't bother me the magazines are gone. I have lost so much cool shit in my life that I can't remember a fraction of it, or even, think or feel a ways about any of these things.
Too much self-reflection is never helpful, but there are times I wonder how I have reached where I am. Sometimes I am not sure. I would read interviews or stories in which a subject mentioning a magazine or a record changing their young life. I really don't like those kinds of pieces. I bet it's because I have read too many of these interviews and am too critical regarding this line of reasoning. Of course the record and book changed your life. You're young, and your life is bound to change. That's what being alive is: changing. That's what a formative experience is. It goes without saying, doesn't it? Those kinds of sentences or revelations in interviews feel like to me that the subject is parroting something they read in another interview. Maybe I just have read too many of these interviews. Maybe I am lucky to interact with so many people whose lives have been touched by art.
Art, of course, is not for self-improvement, or for the changing, though it can become that. Too much inward focus isn't helpful. The trick I suppose is who you become, or what you do with it. Which is something I have been thinking about a little more. I get up in the morning, do my thing, go to work, do my thing. Who knows what the record will show down the line. So that Mad Magazine changed my life goes without saying. It was a very big and successful magazine that was perfectly executed for a very long time and you really can't throw a rock without hitting someone who has been made different by reading it. How much the magazine changed me, and what it means outside my immediate sphere is a subject best unaddressed. But I do have to mention that the most important and best, the happiest and most edifying thing, by far, to happen in my childhood was finding those magazines. I don't know where I would have been without them. Nothing is close.
Thanks for reading.
Snake
PS: here is an interview with me by my friend Becky about my reading habits on serveemasentence.com. And congrats to AJ and Kate on their baby.