The ‘Mad’ Files: Writers and Cartoonists on the Magazine That Warped America’s Brain!

Mikics (Stanley Kubrick), an English professor at the University of Houston, brings together vibrant reflections on Mad magazine’s legacy from an impressive roster of fans and former contributors. His introduction describes Mad’s beginnings as a collaboration between comics publisher Bill Gaines and illustrator Harvey Kurtzman in the early 1950s, its heyday in the 1960s and ’70s, and its “long slow decline” from the 1980s through its final publication in 2019. Among the more scholarly takes is New Yorker writer Adam Gopnik’s argument that the irreverent magazine’s popularity in the 1950s reveals how that decade, the supposed paragon of conformity, enjoyed a more heterogenous cultural mainstream than commonly acknowledged. Most entries are more personal, such as Maus cartoonist Art Spiegelman’s comic that recounts how he begged his mother to buy him his first issue of Mad when he was seven (he became hooked, studying the magazine “the way some kids studied the Talmud”). Selections from former contributors brim with behind-the-scenes hijinks (in a yearslong prank, Gaines convinced a gullible stockroom employee that he had an evil twin brother), and fond appreciations from the likes of Roz Chast and R. Crumb attest to the magazine’s widespread influence. It adds up to a surprisingly multifaceted look at a beloved magazine. (Sept.)