Mad about how to write MAD?

My pal and writer extraordinaire Mark Evanier recently wrote about Al Jaffee’s entry into the Guiness Book of World Records (and I was not surprised to find out that Mark was one of the experts consulted to verify Al’s record), and as often happens on Mark’s wonderful blog one thing led to another resulting in his taking a poll on what people consider the correct stylistic way to write “MAD” along with the “magazine” after it… what do you capitalize? What do you italicize? He lists four possibilities:

1. MAD magazine
2. MAD Magazine
3. MAD magazine
4. MAD Magazine

Mark polled his readers, many of whom are editors, proofreaders and teachers of English. You can read his results here, but the final answer seems to be “it depends”, meaning it depends on the style template of the publication it is appearing in.

When editing my book, The Mad Art of Caricature, my editor Celestia Ward and I went around about this. We can to the same conclusion as Mark does… it depends. Our choice was the second one on the list… MAD Magazine. We are sticking to it.