Sunday Mailbag- X-Rated MAD?

Q: Your understandable reluctance to do ‘blue’ art reminds me that I recently bought (here in Australia) a couple of oldish German and Dutch MADs out of curiosity (Torres, Aragonés but no Drucker). Anyway there was more than a few x-rated cartoons which I found was not in the spirit of the MAD I know. How do the UGOI feel about this and what power do/did they have to influence it?

A: The foreign editions of the magazine license the MAD name and logo, Alfred and some other properties they own, and a certain amount of the US MAD’s content for reprint, but the foreign publishers have control over the “local” content that is printed around the American MAD stuff. Since other countries and cultures have a very different idea of what is appropriate for humor than us uptight Americans, it would not surprise me if they contained a lot more racy content than our version has. That said, I’d be surprised if they had actual “x-rated” content… but if you say they do then I guess I stand surprised.

You say the foreign issues you saw were “oldish”, so perhaps back then MAD was less controlling of what content of their own these publishers included. Today I suspect things are a little tighter in that regard. I’m not sure if the legal people at Warner Bros would be as okay with certain kinds of content in a magazine with their logo on the cover. In this day and age of “branding” most companies closely control their licensing to protect their brand. I really have no idea, though. You’d need to ask WB legal.

Personally I have no problems with that sot of thing. Like I said other cultures view nudity and sex a lot more casually than we do here in the U.S. and more power to them. I can’t speak for other UGOI. Jack Davis famously stopped doing work for MAD when he felt it was getting too raunchy. He said he didn’t want to work for a magazine he would not want his grandkids reading. Regardless no contributor to MAD would have any influence over what appears in foreign editions.

Thanks to Col for the question. If you have a question you want answered for the mailbag about cartooning, illustration, MAD Magazine, caricature or similar, e-mail me and I’ll try and answer it here!