Ich bin ein MAD Leser? Not in Australia…

Number One Son Tom recently returned from a three week college choir tour of Germany, Austria, and the Czech Republic, and he brought me home this issue of the German MAD magazine! MAD still has a few foreign language editions out there (though not as many as they used to have), and the German MAD is one of them. The way these work is the foreign edition licenses the MAD name and format, and gets a certain amount of content from the U.S. version of the magazine. They translate that into their language and then fill the rest of the issue with MAD-flavored work but from local artists and writers that usually centers on local politics and pop-culture.

Sad news out of Australia on that front, however.

Aussie illustrator extraordinaire (and fellow member of the Usual Gang of Idiots) Anton Emdin broke the news this week that the Australian edition of MAD will no longer be running the work of local artists and writers… all the content will come from the U.S. edition of MAD.

That’s sad, since the whole point of having an Australian edition of MAD is to have Australian content in it. No one in the U.S. MAD is going to “take the mickey” out of Tony Abbot… so if the Aussie MAD doesn’t use Aussie artists/writers, does Abbot get a free pass? Actually the real shame is that so many terrific cartoonists won’t be getting their work published in the Aussie MAD anymore. I’m not sure if they will still publish an “Australian MAD” or just put the U.S. one on the stands instead. It makes no sense to repackage only U.S. content.