A MAD without MAD?

This week MAD artist Dalton Vaughn posted this interesting tidbit on a couple of MAD Facebook groups:

I also had a conversation about a year or so ago with Mike about this very thing. At the time he was just considering what kind of a market might be available for a MAD-like humor magazine now that MAD was moving to reprinted content.

BTW, if you are not familiar with The American Bystander, it’s a humor publication very unlike MAD both in tone and format. It’s kind of like a satirical New Yorker. It’s mostly text articles, but it does have a fair amount of cartoons and comic format features, as well as some really great illustrations. You can get more info here, including some free sample issues. They have a patreon for subscriptions.

Anyway Mike and I discussed the future of publications in the MAD vien. The first thing we talked about what “could a MAD style humorous magazine be economically viable?”

The answer is “maybe”, although Mike was quite convinced it could be. The media giant that is AT&T/Warner Bros/DC deals with stockholders and money in the billions of dollars. They frankly don’t care much about a single publication that only sells 100,000 copies or so. It’s expenses are enormous, so it concentrates on intellectual properties that generate enormous money. MAD does not, and has no licensing potential for movies/TV shows/games other than maybe Spy vs. Spy, so it’s at best a non-entity to them. It’s still a valuable brand, though, with a strong nostalgia appeal and pop-culture impact history and almost 70 years of content they own free and clear for reprinting, books, etc. Mike thought a smaller publisher with a lot less overhead and no shareholders/corporate overlords to answer to could produce a MAD like publication on a tight budget and eek out a profit. There would never be a Bill Gaines-like rise from the ashes to become a pop-culture powerhouse selling millions of copies, but produce a bi-monthly magazine that operated in the black? Possible.

That said, we talked about two possible futures (other than extinction) for the continuation of MAD or a MAD-like publication that contained all new content:

1. DC licenses out the MAD brand to another publisher, who produces the magazine independently
2. A new publication is created that fills the void left now that MAD is a reprint magazine.

Let’s start with the first one, DC licensing out MAD to another publisher:

There is precedent in the comics world with companies licensing out their characters for other publishers to do new stories and comics with them. In 2018 Marvel licensed out some of their characters to IDW to produce a series of comics aimed at “middle grade school” readers. Disney had recently been licensing their characters out to IDW to produce Duck, Descendants, etc. comics, so with Disney now owning Marvel that is not a big surprise…except Disney was never a comic book publisher and has been licensing their characters out to comic companies like Dell, Gold Key, etc. since the 1940s. Marvel is a comic publishing company, so having another publisher create and publish comics with some of their biggest characters like Spider-Man is a sort of a big deal.

Could DC license out the MAD brand to let someone else produce the magazine? This is also (somewhat) not without precedent. For over 60 years MAD was/has been licensed out to over 25 foreign publishers who produced their own version of MAD in their respective countries. The Australian MAD is still going today, and in fact is the only publication with the MAD logo on the cover still producing substantial new content in each issue. I believe all foreign issues of MAD contained content from the American version, reprinted and translated as needed, but they also produced a lot of their own stuff, local content that focused on their own country’s culture, media and politics. I say this is “somewhat” of a precedent because all those licensed magazines were sold outside the US so a bit of a different animal, but the point is MAD has been licensed out in the past.

So, is it possible MAD could be licensed out to another publisher for them to produce the magazine indepently?

I’d have to say the chances are slim to none, and slim just got COVID-19.

First, DC would not license out the MAD brand for a cup of coffee. It would probably want so much that the idea of a smaller publisher producing a magazine called MAD on a shoestring budget would be a non-starter. DC would charge them more than the shoes before they ever got a chance to get to the shoestrings. Second, in this PC world, DC would never allow another publisher independent control of the content of any of their properties, let alone a satirical/parody magazine that at its best pushed those boundaries. I really have no idea how much editorial control MAD exercised with the foreign versions. I doubt they spent the time approving every page, but they probably had a list of guidelines that they required the publishers to follow, like no blatant nudity or pornography, etc. No one in the sixties was thinking about having to protect “The Brand” like they do today, especially since the likelihood of large numbers of people in the US seeing the foreign editions in those days was slim. This is 2020, and “optics” is the buzzword. DC would insist on approval of everything and would have to dedicate editorial resources to police the content to protect their brand, thus putting any licensed MAD squarely under the corporate yolk anyway.

That leaves option number two, create a new humor magazine enough like MAD to fill that role (without the WB lawyers going after them) and capture the former MAD audience and hopefully build on it.

It’s more than possible to produce a new MAD clone like that. It’s just a matter of putting the right people together and getting start-up capital. The main question is if there is a big enough audience to support such a magazine these days. That’s a pretty big IF. MAD‘s subscription number in 2019 was just over 150,000, which is very respectable in this day and age. I’m quite sure that if Mike or any publisher could sell 150K worth of copies of a publication like that with a much smaller overhead than DC had, they’d be jumping up and down in excitement. That’s very unrealistic, because I think they vast majority of those subscriptions came from MAD loyalists who simply re-up their subscriptions without much thought and who would not transfer over to a non-MAD magazine easily.

In many ways this new magazine would be starting from scratch. Necessarily gone for legal reasons would be identifiable MAD staples like Alfred E. Neuman, Spy vs. Spy, the Fold-in, possibly even the marginals. All the considerable MAD traditional flavor like the furshlugginer furshlugginers would need to be abandoned. Yes, they could hire members of the current “Usual Gang of Idiots” to do work… but who is really left? Dick DeBartolo and Desmond Devlin would fit that bill on the writing side. Of the really old gang on the visual side, only Sergio Aragonés is still working, unless they can coax Paul Coker or Sam Viviano to do some stuff. I am probably the next possible inclusion as an artist from the “old” days who was still doing regular work for MAD, and I started in 2000 and many people still consider me a new guy. MAD had a number of really talented artists and writers come on board in the last 5-8 years or so, but none of them will get the old fanbase eager to pick up this new magazine just because of the lack of history. No, while there will be some old school MAD fans who will pick up any new magazine like this to see what it’s all about, a new audience will be vital to the continuation of the publication. MAD couldn’t find that new audience even WITH all the history and tradition behind it. Can a new publication? I just don’t know.

That said, I think this is the absolute best time to try it. The single biggest reason for that is named Sergio Aragonés. Any new MAD like publication needs to bust their budget to bring as much Sergio to the table as they can. He’s arguably the greatest of the pure cartoonists to ever work for MAD (although I would not argue with anyone who wants back Al Jaffee for that title… that’s like comparing Jupiter to Zeus). He’s still at the height of his powers. He’s got an incredible following of fans who will throw their money at anything he does. On top of all that, DC just FIRED him from the pages of MAD with what is essentially a send off tribute issue in #17, which is just coming out now. If there was ever a time where a new outlet for Sergio’s immense talents could benefit from the outrage of MAD loyalists and his own fan base over kicking him to the curb like they are apparently doing, this is it.

Now, I have no idea if Sergio would even be willing to work for such a publication, but I expect he would if they just met his page rate. He’s a freelancer, and freelancers accept jobs that pay them appropriately. If Mike’s or anyone else’s MAD-ish publication is willing to do that for 6-8 pages of Sergio Aragonés genius in every issue, and can fill the rest of the issue with good stuff, I think they could make a go of it given the expenses can be kept reasonable.

I hope Mike gives this a try, and I hope he makes a go of it. Having Bill Morrison at the helm is a good start. I’d love to see what he could do without upper management breathing down his neck and dictating what he has to do. I’d really love to see a pure cartooning/comics magazine find a way to stay afloat in this marketplace.