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Raise your hand if you had a subscription to Mad magazine. Come on, nice and high so I can see ’em!
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It’s incalculable to measure the influence of those writers and artists on a young, spongey mind. I subscribed for years and years.
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Neko Case writes about this specific issue in her blisteringly brilliant memoir, The Harder I Fight the More I Love You, which is every bit as excellent as Rickie Lee Jones’s “rock” memoir.
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It occurs to me that, at age 11, I might have read this same issue. Perhaps not. But I like that connection between Neko Case and me, the way any great book connects every reader who encounters it. We were all there together, in a sense, across space & time.
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Here’s Neko, upon discovering an old issue:
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I settled in to pore over my first-ever Mad magazine. It was the October 1972 issue. It was for kids, but it wasn’t? It was dark and funny, even though it was ten years old, which, to twelve-year-old me, was ANCIENT. Over the next few weeks, I read through it hundred of times. The women in it were all booby nurse stereotypes, but there was Spy vs. Spy, and Al Jaffee’s crazy-detailed, surreal drawings. Every part of that issue is tattoed in my brain, and acts like a memory portal to the very slow, beautiful, heavy-scented summer that changed my life for the better, showing me a different, kinder world.
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WHAT, ME WORRY?
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Ditto on the huge influence of Mad Magazine on my childhood. Every main character I write has the same subversive outlook. As Art Spiegelman says, “Through Mad Magazine you learned the adults were lying to you.”
When I came to New York as a 23 year old, I was invited to a friend of a family friend’s Rosh Hashanah dinner. The other guest turned out to be Al Feldstein (!) I knew I’d landed in the right city.
And NYC has never been the same.
Cheers, Holly!