James Etheridge

Growing up in the Sixties, before National Lampoon came along and Playboy magazines were something you heard about or occasionally found hidden in your father’s closet, there was Mad Magazine.

Mad Magazine started in the Fifties and took off in the Sixties, featuring satire and humor aimed mostly at politics and pop culture. My best friend at school introduced me to Mad in the sixth grade. I quickly became an avid reader and budgeted thirty cents every month to purchase the current issue. A lot of the political and pop culture stuff went over my head, but I gobbled up the rest of the features like biscuits and gravy.

The truth be told, Mad Magazine was one of the main reasons for my academic decline the last two years of elementary school, along with sports and a budding interest in girls. I would put a Mad in my notebook and read it while I was supposed to be studying science or history. It didn’t matter if I had read that particular issue ten times already. It mesmerized and fascinated me, the artwork in particular. Mort Drucker, Don Martin, Al Jaffee, Dave Berg, Sergio Aragones, Jack Davis, those artists were all like gods to me. I would sit at my desk in my room at home, or often in the classroom and copy their work, trying my best to imitate their unique styles, usually if not always falling far short of succeeding. Drawing in class got me in trouble at school, to the point where Mrs. Wilson, my teacher, told my parents, “He may be the next Baldy, but I’ve got to teach him to multiply and divide first!” Baldy was a political cartoonist for the Atlanta Constitution at the time. The fact that those guys could draw characters and cartoons for a national magazine, get paid to do it and not get into trouble was beyond my realm of comprehension. Growing up I always said I wanted to be an astronaut, but in reality it bounced back and forth between being an astronaut and an artist for Mad Magazine.

Mort Drucker in particular was my idol. Mad invariably produced two satirical send-ups of current movies and TV shows. Virtually all of them were drawn by Drucker.   I was fascinated by his ability to capture perfectly the looks, facial expressions and body language of the stars of the movie, turning them into hilarious parodies of themselves. Some of the movies and shows I remember being spoofed, and I’m using the Mad names here, wereVoyage To See What’s On The Bottom, Bats Man, The Spy Who Came In For The Gold, The Sound Of Money, Fantastecch Voyage, The Oddfather, The Empire Strikes Out, Guess Who’s Throwing Up Dinner, Loused Up In Space, Hullabadig Au Go Go and Twelve O’Crocked High, to name a few. In an interview on the Tonight Show in 1985, Johnny Carson asked Michael J. Fox how he really knew when he had made it in show business. “When Mort Drucker drew my head,” was his reply.

Don Martin was another of my favorites. Often billed as Mad’s Maddest Artist, his characters featured bulbous noses, long faces, half open eyes and large hinged feet. They often had rhyming names such as Fester Bestertester, Ringo Fonebone, Irving Freenbean and Lance Parkertip. The strips were outrageous, slapstick, bizarre and hilarious. His work was complied into books sold by Mad and in 1966, at the height of the Batman craze, he published an original book, The Mad Adventures of Captain Klutz. Captain Klutz was, in typical Martin fashion, a social misfit who unwittingly becomes a superhero. He battles several different villains in the book, invariably capturing them accidentally due to one of his major screw-ups.

About halfway through the sixth grade our class began publishing a weekly newspaper. It covered school news, current events, sports and features submitted by members of the class. Pamela was our editor, Jack was the sports editor, several other students were reporters and my friend Butch and I were the cartoonists. Susan Camp’s mother would type the newspaper up each week on mimeograph paper and Mrs. Ivey, the school secretary, would run them on the machine in the office and staple each edition together. They would then be distributed to our class. Butch and I were given one blank mimeograph sheet each week. He would draw three strips, give the sheet to me and I would draw three. Butch lived on the street behind me and we were buddies from the first grade through high school. The two of us drew cartoons and pictures of ships, tanks, planes and hot rods all through grammar school. The difference in Butch and me was that he knew when to turn it off, pay attention in class and concentrate on schoolwork. I had a hard time channeling that. That’s probably why he wound up graduating from Georgia Tech and becoming a successful architect while I kicked around in dead end jobs for five years after high school before enrolling in DeKalb Tech and getting an Associate’s Degree in Commercial Art.

My best friend in the neighborhood Billy and I wrote and drew our own version of Mad sometime in the sixth grade. My mother worked for Harper Freight Lines and they had acquired a new piece of equipment called a Xerox machine. It would make copies of documents direct from the originals. We wrote and drew our features and strips, called it Maniac Magazine, gave it to my mother and waited in anticipation. I had a picture in my mind that the artwork would be sharp and clear just like in Mad. We both had visions of running multiple copies and selling them at school and in the neighborhood. That all crashed to the ground when she brought our copies home. They were dark, smudgy, off center and stapled together on the side. I asked if she could make more copies and was told no, they cost (I don’t remember how many cents apiece) to run. We were disappointed, but decided to do a second edition. We started on Issue Number Two, lost interest and never finished it.

I think the last issue of Mad that I bought was in the early Eighties. I don’t remember what it cost but now the magazine can only be purchased by subscription. Issued bi-monthly, it costs $35.94 per year, which comes to $5.99 per copy. Now owned by DC Comics, the fact that Mad is still published is mind-boggling. The year 2022 was its seventieth year in circulation. There is no longer any new art or material featured in the magazine, only reprints from the old issues. That alone is a testament to the fact that the works of my artistic heroes of youth have stood the test of time. Circulation is way down, reaching its lowest point ever in 2022. But Mad Magazine is still around, prompting a reference to the motto of Alfred E. Neuman, the magazine’s wonky-eyed, wing-nut eared, gap-toothed cover boy, which happens to be, “What, Me Worry?”