Monday MADness: Last NYC MAD

MAD #550 is starting to show up in subscribers mailboxes and digitally via the MAD app, etc. (Cover above by Mark Fredrickson). I’ll list the contents as always in the week the issue is due on newsstands, which is next week Tuesday. This was the last issue produced by the New York City MAD staff, although the last production touches and the ceremonial sending off to the printer actually took place in the new year at the new offices in Burbank. Word is the new LA MAD staff added the copy above the logo on the cover, and the back cover image teasing the “New MAD“:

I’ll let you make of that what you will.

I can neither confirm or deny that the next issue of MAD will be #1 rather than #551. If it is a new #1, then the good news is that you will now finally be able to afford a mint copy of MAD #1! For those lamenting that there will be no issue #551, that’s not true. You’ll just have to wait 91 years and 8 months to get it.

This issue is, in many ways, a real swan song to the NYC MAD staff. You will see cameos by many of the staff in various features and art and writing from several longtime members of the Usual Gang of Idiots that you have not seen much of the last several years, as well as some new contributors that had just started to catch on with the staff. There is one particular article featuring “mug shots” but actually using caricatures of some of the Usual Gang. Artists did their own caricatures, and some of us were asked to do drawings of the writers. Unfortunately, the key to who is who on the letters page has me and Mike Morse switched around… Mike got the worst end of that deal.

It was a great privilege to have been part of MAD while it was still produced in New York with a staff that were directly involved with the Bill Gaines era. MAD will certainly be changing with the new staff, but change is only a bad thing if MAD were to stop being MAD… not by doing new things but by losing its voice. I’d just say to longtime readers and fans- give the first year of issues a chance and decide for yourselves. Don’t buy into this kind of crap until you have actually seen what new editor Bill Morrison and the gang have going.