Mad magazine coming to an end

When I was a kid, I used to keep up with movies by reading Mad Magazine. There were movies and TV shows I had never seen that I still knew about, that I could still recognize if I saw them on TV, because I read spoofs of them in Mad. 

Now, finally, after all these years, Mad is going belly up. Going the way of the dodo.

In the early seventies there were a lot fewer James Bond movies than there are now, but they did all the James Bond movies in one article. Which meant that each movie had to be boiled down to two or three panels. One, I think, was done in a single panel. I tried to do this myself, writing stories, drawing comics, which implied way more than they showed, which cut the story down to the smallest number of key scenes. Tell your story doing as little work as possible. Just do the beginning and the end. Or just show the end. 

Later, I kept up with movies I didn't go to by watching Siskel & Ebert. They're long gone and all I have left is reading descriptions on Netflix which is quite a bit less informative.

The Mad movie satires had a longer half life than he work of movie critics. Critics retire or pass away and it's like they never existed. Anybody read Pauline Kael or Roger Ebert these days? Mad would reprint their stuff for years.

I did my part to keep it going. I think I've had a couple of subscriptions in the last twenty years. Whenever kids came to the door selling magazine subscriptions for school fundraisers, there was nothing I'd want so I'd subscribe to Mad. I don't know if I even read them. I should have given the kids a direct cash contribution.