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Well — THIS is noteworthy: apparently MAD may be increasing the frequency of publication from 4 times a year to 6! If true, this marks the first halfway positive news after a couple years of unremittingly negative news for the magazine. To put it in objective astronomical terms, this is the first “expansion” of the MAD Universe after a period of non-stop “contraction” (You know: the elimination of MAD Kids & MAD Classic; and the slashing of: issues-per-year; staff size; office space; per-issue budget; page-rate paid to Writers & Artists…)

Obviously, this stay of execution has something to do with the departure of the old Paul Levitz & Co. executives from DC COMICS, and the announcement last month of the new executive team, touted as more “MAD-friendly” than the last. So…were the Levitz Gang just a bunch of bean-counters too quick to “pull the trigger” on MAD? Or are these new guys really willing to go the extra mile to give it every chance to survive? Probably both. (Which I say, not only because it sounds reasonable, but because that’s how they always answer on the Sunday TV News talk shows when presented with an either/or question.)

While this increase in publication frequency isn’t going to solve all of MAD’s problems (like…oh, losing 95% of their peak paid circulation of a generation ago)…it’ll definitely give them the opportunity to pull the rabbit out of the hat! But, one thing you can say for sure:  even if it’s only a temporary reprieve, this is indisputably better for MAD than the alternative, under the old DC guard - a continuation of the Big Shrinkage into Nothingness.

But, forget all that! I know what you’re all thinking: how does this affect Mike Snider, personally?  Well, I hate to have to say it, but I may actually lose my penny-ante bet with a friend over when the Last Issue of MAD will be…and wind up having to pay for my own spaghetti dinner! (Sniff, sniff). Oh, okayyyy…I guess I can live with that. [Although I could raise a stink about the conditions of the bet having changed drastically -- i.e., new DC execs who MAY give a shit about MAD vs. old ones who probably didn't! -- but...ah, c'est la vie! It's a good Italian restaurant; a good friend; and I can always put it on my credit card!]

Afterthought: Actually, this move (going to Bi-Monthly, or just announcing that) makes perfect business sense regardless of whether DC COMICS is actually committed to trying to revive MAD — OR bent on killing it off. Just suppose the latter, for a second: announcing that you’re increasing from 4 to 6 issues a year is bound to convince some reluctant subscribers-to-be to finally part with their cash, hmmm? (This was the Entire Business Model of Membership-Gyms in L.A. during the 1980s: A) Get $300 annual membership fees upfront; B) Go out of business & pocket cash). Additionally, it has to be easier to sell ad space in a magazine that’s nominally a “Bi-Monthly” than a “Quarterly”, right? (Need evidence: look at the almost total lack of outside ads in the latest Quarterly MAD issue, #503.).

Tags: MAD topics by Mike_Snider
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For those of you who think all I ever post here are anti-MAD screeds: first, you’re wrong — I’m NOT anti-”MAD”, I’m anti-”the people & practices that are running MAD into the ground!”; second, if you think there’s nothing negative to be said about the current state of MAD, you’re at the wrong blog; you want www.hopeless-pollyanna.com
 
But I do call attention to the positives, as well — such as their latest hardcover book, “1001 MAD pages you must read before you die“. Someone put a lot of thought into the selection of pieces from the first 500 issues. Humor is so subjective that nobody can say what’s the “best” or the “funniest”, but I think everything in this book falls into the “better,” “funnier” and/or “more memorable” end of the scale. I promise, you’ll find your laughs-per-minute ratio far higher reading this book than ploughing through the entirety of MAD (on the CD-ROMs, DVD or the dead-tree version), starting from Issue #1 to the present! (Although every true MAD fanatic has to try that at least once in their lives.)

The clincher that makes this book a MUST-have is the bargain price (at least right now)! Even though it’s only been out a month or so, it’s being discounted at Barnes & Noble online for around $9 — which is a GREAT deal, considering that’s less than the cost of just 2 regular issues of MAD at the newsstand. (And a CRAZY-INCREDIBLE deal when you further consider the paltry amount of original content in what they insist on calling a whole MAD issue these days!)

BTW: I have no independent confirmation of the rumor I just made up that the original title of this book was “1001 MAD pages you must read before MAD dies”. (Sorry…I couldn’t help myself.)

Seriously - buy the book! 

[Full disclosure: I receive no payments ("micro" or otherwise) for steering you to buy this book; and no additional writer's fees for all the articles of mine in this volume -- as I probably mentioned in earlier posts, MAD buys all rights upon original acceptance of material, including the rights to "reprint & reprint until the cows come home!"]

Tags: MAD topics, Uncategorized by Mike_Snider
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No, no, I’m not breaking any “news” here. That’s only my personal educated guess…that the Final Issue of MAD will be #506. And since I just put down an actual bet on it (albeit a friendly penny-ante bet), I figured I had to put it out there for all the world to see whether I’m a psychic or a bonehead! Or both.

How did I arrive at #506 (@Jan. 2011 cover date) as the final issue of MAD? Well, besides the Ouija board and Tarot cards…

First, and most obvious, is what’s already happened to MAD just since the beginning of this year: the slashing of MAD staff; reducing MAD to quarterly publication and totally eliminating MAD Kids and MAD Classics. I’ve heard rumors (unconfirmed, but from 2 different sources) that DC Comics execs had already officially decided to kill off MAD even before announcing “The Big Shrinkage” - but to keep it limping along until after one or more big employment contracts with MAD Staff ends within the next year or so (which they’d have to pay anyway). Plus, the whole going-quarterly charade lets DC look like the good guy supposedly giving MAD “another chance.”

Regardless of whether those rumors are true, let’s look at what else is happening with MAD that doesn’t exactly speak of a magazine that has the confidence, commitment, and resources of its publisher:

–Even the infrequent quarterly issues they’re now putting out are really only “HALF-issues,” in terms of new, original content. And they’re being printed on the cheapest see-through gift-wrapping paper stock available. (Grab a MAD issue from a couple years ago and see how much heavier it is than the current ones.)

–the recent publication of a MAD book (”Bo, Confidential“), written by MAD Editors, illustrated by MAD Artist Tom Richmond — which doesn’t have the MAD logo on the front cover! Sure, there’s a small MAD logo on the book’s spine — but, c’mon, why wouldn’t you put a big one on the front, like (ahem) every other MAD book ever published? Someone along the line must’ve decided it would sell better without one. Not a good sign.

-Whatever the hell is going on with mail subscriptions starting with the latest issue, #501! Right now, the most popular topics on their own madmag.com message boards are “Haven’t gotten my issue yet” and “What’s the deal with putting mailing labels directly on the cover?!” No idea how such a dramatic deterioration in service quality even happens that fast — did DC just switch MAD over to the We Give LESS of a Shit than anyone else, Inc. subscription fulfillment company?!!

Hey, waitaminute — re-reading the above, I think I’ve just figured out the actual end-game strategy that DC Comics has in mind for MAD: Do everything possible to get ALL of the remaining 170,000 MAD-readers totally pissed off at it, so that, when the very last ‘TENTH-of-an-issue printed on Chinese crepe paper’ creaks off the presses late next year…there’ll be literally nobody left to complain! Brilliant!

Tags: MAD topics, Uncategorized by Mike_Snider
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The other day while perusing TMZ.com (slogan: “First with all the Michael Jackson crap you can stand!“), I couldn’t stop myself from flipping through what they say are the never-before-published police photos taken during a surprise raid on Neverland Ranch in 2003, which led to Michael’s infamous child-molestation trial a few years after that.

Imagine my surprise at one of the photos (at left) that clearly shows, on the back wall in the upper right, a cutout/poster of our old friend ALFRED E. NEUMAN (!!!). Right there in the corner of one of many toy-filled rooms that prosecutors called part of Michael’s “child bait” — but defenders of his would call “just a completely innocent toy-filled room, Michael being a kid at heart himself.”

Anyway, after the initial chuckle of recognition upon seeing Alfred there, something occured to me (that may also be occuring to many of you): Whoa, waitaminute: was Michael Jackson himself really a MAD fan? After all the gags & slams & put-downs the magazine published about him over the preceding two decades???** Really?! Is anyone that much of a masochist? But, you may ask, “What if he was just a good sport about all the jokes?” C’mon! Besides — isn’t “good sport” only a facade you put on for other people, not for deciding what mementos to buy/collect/save in the privacy of your own home? (Or what he thought was the “privacy of his own home,” until some cops with a different opinion and a search warrant showed up! Yuk yuk.))

(Someone pointed out to me that the ALFRED-head may be attached to the cartoon poster behind it with vaguely MAD-like panels. Could be — you can’t tell for sure; the photo’s resolution isn’t that good. Was this constructed and sent in by a fan of Michael’s? If so, I still think it’s curious that it’s up on a wall where it is…rather than in a basement closet to be forgotten along with all the other junk people gave him.)

I’m sorry, but I find it beyond belief that Michael would’ve overlooked the hundreds and hundreds of MAD jokes at his expense. To me, there’s a far more likely & obvious reason for the ALFRED E. NEUMAN picture up on his wall: it’s just one more piece of “bait” for luring in “the boys” — like the candy, the Spiderman pajamas, the Transformers, the comic books, the Star Wars forcebeams — hell, all of Neverland Amusement Park Ranch!

As ALFRED himself might say about this if you asked him right now, “Eccchhhh!”

**(Not that I, or any comedy professional, feels the least bit of remorse: if he was going to keep serving up “softballs, right over the plate” like he did, we’d have been fools not to keep hitting them over the fence!)

Tags: MAD topics, Uncategorized by Mike_Snider
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No doubt about it: Michael Jackson will be sorely missed — ESPECIALLY by those of us in the Comedy & Humor Business, including MAD Magazine. I can’t think of another public figure who provided such a strong & steady stream of “comic fodder” over such a long time — more than a quarter of a century! I’ll bet that if you did a text search of the entire contents of MAD since 1980, his name would be the most frequently mentioned, in articles about him but also liberally sprinkled all over other articles & satires as a comic reference. (”…as [blank] as Michael Jackson!” or “…makes Michael Jackson look like [blank]!”)

A few Michael Jackson notes:

• Of all the MJ gags/articles I wrote, my personal favorite was the Michael Jackson/Lisa-Marie Presley Pre-Nuptual Agreement (MAD #333. Jan/Feb 1995) — a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to not only recycle old unused MJ material, but also unused Elvis material, AND newly generated Elvis-&-Michael material! (Forget Lisa-Marie herself! She’s merely a plot device in this whole premise, as she was for the actual marriage!) About a week after the script was bought, I called one of the MAD Editors with an idea to use this piece as a publicity teaser. Have someone issue a fictitious (but real-looking) “Press Release” about the “discovery” of the Michael/Lisa-Marie Pre-Nup, listing some of the gags as if they were actual terms of a legal agreement…and then, in the 4th or 5th paragraph, casually drop in the attribution “MAD Magazine.” Just the sort of jokey celebrity crap/filler that local TV newscasts love. But when I explained the idea to my Editor, all I got was a long, discouraged sigh (the “DC COMICS sigh,” we’d call it) and a flat “they’d never go for it upstairs.” End of story. (Or: Beginning of Story, if the “story” is “How DC COMICS ground MAD down.”)
• My fellow MAD Writer Desmond Devlin told me this little Michael Jackson gem, from his days as a writer at MTV during the 90s (on “Rumor Control” and other game shows; and probably writing 90% of the “ad libs” for Bill Bellamy, Carson Daly, etc.): See, whatever legal/financial arrangements were made between MTV and MJ included the stipulation that the network would ALWAYS refer to Michael as “the King of Pop.” Always. Always. Always. And Jackson’s camp was deadly serious: Whenever some on-air personality would slip up and say “Michael Jackson” WITHOUT adding the mandatory phrase “King of Pop,” the network would actually get stern phone calls and letters from his lawyers and publicity people. Not just once or twice…but EVERY time it happened! (Because: hey, you don’t mess with a KING!)
• Once I heard that Michael Jackson had died, I thought I had finally scored my first actual “hit” from all the “Celebrity Death Odds“-pieces I wrote…but, alas, my Old-Timer’s Disease must be acting up again: it turns out I never did a Michael Jackson Death Odds! (I vaguely recall having written one years ago, but apparently it was never bought or run.) Which means I still have a perfect record: NONE of the nearly 100 celebrities I’ve hypothetically “killed off” over the past couple decades has actually died! What are the odds?! [This death-immunity only applies to the Celebrity Death Odds that I myself wrote, up to MAD #458 (Oct. 2005) -- and NOT the just-for-spite Celeb Death Odds that the MAD Editors have been churning out since their Nixonian reaction to my starting this blog a year ago. All of their Celebrities are going to die before next Christmas.]

Tags: MAD topics, Other topics by Mike_Snider
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Hey, I just found something interesting on YouTube (that doesn’t involve a singing cat or a dramatic rodent): it’s the piece on MAD Magazine that 60 Minutes did, way back in 1987 (hat-tip to Dick DeBartolo for having re-posted it on his own site…hopefully it’ll stay up on YouTube for awhile before the Corporate Video Yankers find it!)

This story aired the night before we all gathered at Kennedy Airport in NYC for the 1987 MAD Trip (Paris & Zermatt, Switzerland), which happened to be my very first MAD Trip. It also lead to getting my very first belly laugh out of Bill Gaines, about an hour after meeting him. See, once this 60 Minutes piece aired, Bill suddenly started getting recognized by probably 100 times the usual number of strangers, coming up to him and saying “Hey, aren’t you that MAD guy?” or “Weren’t you on 60 Minutes last night?” After a non-stop parade of maybe a dozen people accosting Bill in the airline ticket-counter line, I tugged on his rumpled white shirt sleeve, pretending to be another of them, and breathlessly said to him, “Hey, I know you: aren’t you that guy who testified at the Kefauver Crime Committee hearings back in 1954?” [Check out the brief clip of actual footage from Bill's infamous appearance at that hearing, toward the end of this video.]

BTW: Note Morley Safer’s first line of questioning, essentially taking MY side about MAD being “outdated” — 22 years ago!

Tags: MAD topics by Mike_Snider
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If there’s one thing readers of this blog are guaranteed to take away from it (Hell, I won’t shut up about it!), it’s my belief that MAD needed to Change, far more than it actually has, to survive.

However, in the interests of fairness and equal time (not to mention mock humility), I have to admit it’s entirely possible that I and everyone else who feels the same are full of shit; that making dramatic and wholesale changes to MAD could’ve driven it faster and deeper into the Magazine Death Pool than it’s already headed.

What brought this up again to me was the story of the recent re-branding of Tropicana Orange Juice. See, late last year, executives there decided it was time for change, specifically, a total package re-design. So, they went to the (formerly) most respected design firm in New York, threw millions of dollars at them, and got an entirely new package…which then proceeded to lose them 20% of their sales in less than 2 months! Think about that: a 20% drop in under 2 months! Usually all it takes is a single-digit YEARLY sales decline to put a company into panic mode!

Why did 20% of presumably satisfied Tropicana customers suddenly stop buying the exact same orange juice in a different package (at right in photo)? No one’s exactly sure, but the theories run from absence of the familiar Tropicana “straw-in-the-orange” on the label…to the new package looking like a generic or house-brand orange juice. Whatever the reasons, it’s clear that this well-intentioned move to modernize and “refresh” the branding backfired on Tropicana, big time. (If you’re interested, read about it in this article; it also links to a longer original article in Advertising Age - which is behind a Registration wall, sorry!)

What does this have to do with MAD? Hold your horses, I’m getting to it: About 3 or 4 years ago, I had a conversation with one of the MAD editors right after I’d read a startling newspaper report that fully 1/3 of all U.S. households have NEVER owned a computer (!!!) and therefore were extremely unlikely to be regular Internet users, or even that familiar with the Internet at all. I asked the editor if maybe the universe of Remaining MAD Readers included a disproportionately large number of this non-Internet-using demographic. He said they had no idea. Seriously.

The $64,000 Questions: What if it does turn out that, say, 50%, 60%, 70% of MAD Readers are NON-internet users? If you suddenly change MAD to appeal more to Internet users, you could be screwing yourself royally. Or, worse, what if MAD had successfully transitioned to a full Web presence (not the POS bare-bones site they have now!)? That 50%, 60%, 70% would never even be in a position to find it!

Once you commit to Change, you never know for sure how it’ll turn out. (No doubt that uncertainty has fed the inertia in the editorial offices!) But - when you’re talking about a magazine that’s plummeted from a peak circulation of 2.1 million all the way down to 170,000 now…if it were me, I still think I would’ve taken the gamble on Change rather than Standing Pat.

Tags: MAD topics, Uncategorized by Mike_Snider
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Sure, I’m an old crank and a cynic…but I’m not completely immune to sentimentality. I just got my hands on MAD Classics #25, containing 3 pieces I wrote for MAD years ago, and I suddenly realized: this is almost certainly the FINAL appearance of my byline in anything-”MAD” on the newsstands after 30 years (since both MAD Classics and MAD Kids are now ceasing publication, and the last new writing I did for MAD or MAD Kids was the end of 2006). So, hoist up whatever beverage you have handy right now, and join me in a toast to the Official Death of the “Writer: Mike Snider” MAD-Byline! Ziggy-ziggy, ziggy-ziggy, oy, oy, oy! (Urp!)

Now, as far as the active part of my MAD-writing career (as opposed to the “Reprint part”), it had no such neat & tidy “end-point.” It was just an uneventful, slow-motion petering-out. No, I take that back: there was ONE “event” - the most bizarre phone call I’ve ever been subjected to in my life! - that, while it didn’t directly lead to the end of my writing for MAD, did sort of “upset the apple cart” of an otherwise smooth 2-decade-long working relationship I had with the Editor who placed the “offending” phone call (about which: the less said, the better!). So, for anyone curious about why I stopped writing for MAD:

See, early in this decade, my ‘acceptance percentage’ [the % of submitted-premises that are ultimately bought & published] dropped from the 20-30% range to around 10%. For whatever reason, my writing wasn’t “connecting” with the MAD Editors as frequently as before. (Which I don’t “blame” anyone for; MAD has no obligation to any of its freelance contributors, we all know that. And, “what’s funny” is one of the most subjective things in life — its all personal opinion.)

But, anyway, the drop to around 10% wasn’t, by itself, too alarming - you could live with it, just means cranking out more premises. Except for two things that were happening around this time, one affecting every MAD Writer, and the other, probably (I hope!) just me: First, the Editorial response times to writers in general were getting longer and longer (which I attribute to all the extra workload DC Comics started piling on to them: going from 8 to 12 issues a year; adding more Specials & books; starting MAD Kids; color; advertising; etc.). But the second thing — the bizarre 2002 phone call about which the less I say, the better — was apparently so difficult for the “offending” Editor to reconcile having made to me, that he just DIDN’T. His “solution” to his self-created professional speed-bump was…to totally move me over to being handled by a different Editor, and to avoid talking to me altogether (except briefly in passing at a MAD Xmas party).

This second Editor I was passed along to - he’s a good guy, but he had “his own” stable of freelancers he was already too busy with and, well…I guess I just fell between the cracks. What had become simply “bad” response times for everyone else (I’m assuming), became “glacial” in my case. It was typical, from, say, 2002 onward for me to have to wait 6 months, a year, even 14 months to hear back from Editors on a single draft (I’ve got my meticulously kept Logbook to prove it). The previous norm had been 1 or 2 months, 3 at the absolute most! (And, as I keep pointing out to no avail, there are two pieces from over 5 years ago that I STILL haven’t heard back about!)

Along about 2003/2004, it became apparent to me that, even if I were able to get my ‘acceptance percentage’ back up to where it was (OR crank out a lot more premises)…I would probably never return to the MAD-income I’d enjoyed in the 80s & 90s because of the RIDICULOUS length of time it was now taking to get ANYTHING of mine through the editorial process (much less to the check-writing phase)!

Therefore, I proceeded to do what 99.9% of freelance writers have to do (which I had been spared during the umpteen years I wrote for MAD and MAD alone): I found other work. In 2004, MAD accounted for just half of my total income; for the next couple years, it was 10% or less; by the end of 2006, my attitude (and theirs?) was “eh, why bother?”

So, there’s the story.“Sour grapes?” Decide for yourself. (I’d say more like “Petrified raisins,” the length of time they left me to stew on the back burner.)

Tags: MAD topics, Uncategorized by Mike_Snider
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Well, well, well…
I was digging through my cardboard boxes of old MAD papers for stuff to write about…and lookee what I re-discovered: it’s the actual letter — signed by the former, and the current, president of DC COMICS — sent out to all of us MAD folks after they took over following the death of Bill Gaines in 1992. As I’ve helpfully highlighted, you can see where they promise, in writing, NOT to move the MAD offices from 485 Madison Ave. and NOT to discontinue the MAD Trips — both of which they subsequently did within a couple years of this letter!

Too bad they didn’t have time to write a longer  letter…or they might have provided a more comprehensive list of “promises” they would later go on to break, such as:
-Not to make MAD start taking advertising
-Not to move the MAD offices for a second  time in less than 15 years
-Not to discontinue MAD Xmas parties
-Not to interfere in editorial decisions
-Not to “kill” articles after they’ve been written & bought simply because someone “could possibly” sue over them
-Not to more than DOUBLE the workload while slashing the staff
-Not to sell off the last of MAD’s original cover art that’s been hanging on the office walls for decades

Keep this history of mendacity in mind whenever you read or hear something coming out of DC COMICS –or MAD itself, for that matter, since the current guys in charge seem more interested in indulging their “inner quisling” than, say, being honest and straightforward with readers and contributors about what’s really happening to the magazine. (See this very interesting post at madmumblings.com from John Hett of “The Journal of MADness” if you haven’t already.)

Tags: MAD topics by Mike_Snider
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Mar. 3, 2009 - New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg and members of the group U2 pretend to be looking up at “U2″-streetsign while, in fact, peering through 4th floor windows of 1700 Broadway building across the street at the MAD Magazine Editors inside, busy writing cheerful press releases about what “good news” it is that parent company DC Comics is cutting them back to quarterly publication and slashing their staff to the bone.

Tags: MAD topics, Uncategorized by Mike_Snider
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