Monday MADness: Fake Covers!

July 27th, 2020 | Posted in MAD Magazine
1950’s “cover we didn’t use”

Back in the fall of 2000 MAD published issue #400, which was a special full color issue on nice paper stock. I had just had my first piece appear in the issue before, and I was surprised to get any assignment for such a big milestone issue. One of the features was called “The Untold History of MAD” which was a sort of timeline with gags from the magazine’s long life. I was one of the artists who did some “covers we didn’t use” from each decade. These printed really small in the magazine.

1960’s
1970’s
1980’s
1990’s

These were described as a double cover issue printed the morning after Boris Yelsin’s attempted coup of Russia, done in the manner of the Nixon/Kennedy double cover for MAD #60 where MAD hedged its bet as to who was going to come out on top:

“We were with you all the way, Boris!”
“We were with you all the way, comrade!”

Comments

  1. john m says:
    July 27, 2020 at 4:19 pm

    I always wondered how far MAD would go. Would they actually have Mickey Mouse caught in a mousetrap? A Norwegian MAD sorta did that. It had Donald Duck using his nephews as decoys to catch ducks. I couldn’t stop laughing.

  2. Desmond Devlin says:
    July 27, 2020 at 9:15 pm

    I wrote more “historic” cover gags for this one article than I ended up writing actual cover ideas for the magazine in 37 years.

    And if you add up the combined space of all these Untold History of MAD covers? I was paid as much as I received for writing one-half of one regular cover idea.

    I should’ve gone to business school.

  3. 48colorrainbow says:
    July 28, 2020 at 6:06 pm

    Were you the one who did the Gulf War-era cover featuring Alfred toasting marshmallows over an Iraqi soldier’s burning body?

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