Madness

It’s hard to believe that a humour magazine started in 1952 could still be publishing much the same kind of stuff over 55 years later (MAD was started by Harvey Kutzman as a satire on other comics). Over the years MAD has looked at art and used art clichés on its covers many, many times. The two covers illustrated here were published nearly 50 years apart but both rely on the same basic idea – art is as dumb as anything else in the world. These MAD musings were triggered by news of the magazine reducing its monthly publishing schedule to once every three months. In true MAD tradition editor John Ficarra said, “The feedback we’ve gotten from readers is that only every third issue of MAD is funny. So we decided to just publish those.” You can see some MAD art parodies of Norman Rockwell here on OTN Stuff along with other art-related features including the MAD fold-out which we have posted on before.