No place for MAD in a World Gone Ever Madder

FOR THE SNOB, THE HIGHBROW and those who feigned ignorance, it was easy to dismiss MAD Magazine as silly, sophomoric trash, supermarket checkout line fodder a harried mom might quickly yank from her kid's grubby hands and stuff right back into the rack where it came from.

The end of the line, styled as a throw-back,
and, at $5.99, no longer really "cheap."

As one of those grubby kids, I knew better.

MAD was the key to unlocking the truth about the adult universe, the hypocrisy, the vanity and inherent cynicism of every day life. Each issue was a cleverly disguised instruction manual, teaching kids how to see through, if not actually defeat, the bullshit being shoveled their way every day.

Every goddamned day.

MAD was dynamite. Now it's done.

After 64 years, America's greatest purveyor of subversive satirical shtick has published its final issue of new material. From here on in, it'll be all re-packaged greatest hits collections not unlike the quarterly Super Specials MAD churned out when I was a kid, only more so. Immortality through re-runs.

The cause of death: Obsolescence.

MAD outlived its usefulness, done in by a world crazier than the one it lampooned, superseded by TV bridezillas, bachelors and bachelorettes, by real housewives and teen moms, by Survivor, The Apprentice and by a social media landscape more shameless and self-referential than its editors ever imagined.

A Super Special reprint

MAD was born in the ultra-self-congratulatory, self-serious 1950s, a time of sock hops and the red menace, of Disneyland and fall-out shelters, of American chest-thumping over beating the Axis powers and making the world safe for suburbia and shopping malls.

It sprung from the skull of publisher William M. Gaines and legendary artist Harvey Kurtzman as a full color comic book, something I only ever glimpsed as reprints packaged with those Super Specials.

That incarnation lasted just 23 issues before being transformed into the glossy-cover black and white illustrated magazine we came to know and love.

My dad got that first issue of the new MAD while serving in the U.S. Army and kept it long enough to give it to me together with a half dozen more issues of similar vintage, proving this type of MADness too could be hereditary.

Where it began: dad's July '55 issue

There was a lot of mocking of Madison Avenue (those other Mad Men) in that first outing, their gray flannel-suited false earnestness, plus jibes at mid-century modernity, television, professional wrestling (as if it needed to be mocked) and America's as-yet-unrealized space program.

In time, the magazine would turn its sights on Elvis Presley, Walt Disney and, unavoidably, politics, producing for its December 1956 issue a cover both timeless and iconic.

About 25 years later, I started reading MAD and, in 1976, became a subscriber.

I was 11 years old and wouldn't miss an issue for the next four years, spending lots of time with the so-called "usual gang of idiots" -- Al Jaffee, the father of the fold-in, purveyor of Snappy Answers to Stupid Questions; Dave Berg's The Lighter Side...; Antonio Prohias' Cold War-inspired Spy vs. Spy and Don Martin's epic onomatopoetic sound effects.

December '56, October '80

SHTOINK!!!

They repeatedly spoofed Star Trek and Star Wars which meant a great deal to an unrepentant geek like me. I remain forever grateful.

MAD was great fun.

Behind the humor, there were serious messages from the editors: they hated hypocrisy and war, drugs, poverty, bigotry, pollution and politicians.

Their send-up of The French Connection was titled What's the Connection? In it, Gene Hackman's "Cockeye" Doyle is an unabashed bigot telling every minority he's encounters -- real or imagined -- to go back to where they came from. That lesson stayed with me. Even as a kid, I got the point that that was wrong.

MAD taught generations of kids to think critically about what they were being told and sold by the establishment. Its writers' unsubtle message: People are generally full of crap.

They were of course right. For a time the formula worked and MAD had a little media empire going, one filled with paperback books, phonograph records and even a TV show.

Peak geek -- October 1976

In 2013, they published Inside MAD, full-color, hard cover coffee table book -- not even its first! -- a gorgeous 256-page collection of its creators' favorite entries -- much which came from the sweet spot of my era, MAD's golden age  -- plus encomiums from Judd Apatow, Whoopi Goldberg, Ken Burns, Todd McFarlane, Ice-T, Tony Hawk, Mad Men creator Matthew Weiner and others.

MAD influenced all of them too.

Nine issues ago, its publishers attempted a re-launch, resetting the counter to issue 1 from 550, to no avail. The insanity of every day life had rendered MAD passably sane. Now, the magazine has wrapped up its role in educating America's youth, leaving disciples everywhere.

We're still out there, and we can see right through you.

-- Follow me on Twitter @paperboyarchive

Forget About The Last Jedi, What About The First?

A LONG TIME AGO in a galaxy far, far away...

Star Wars, the book, published in 1976.

It was a time of single-screen movie theaters, of $4 tickets and $2.50 matinees. Cable television was in its 30-some-odd channel infancy, home video players were new. Three broadcast TV networks ruled the airwaves.

It was 1977 and that was all there was.

Into this now unimaginably finite universe burst Star Wars, a cinematic force the likes of which had never been seen. Looking back across a 40-year landscape of movies -- now nine -- animated TV series, toys, clothes and all manner of pop-culture bric-a-brac, it's virtually impossible to convey the revolutionary newness of that first film.

If you were born before 1972, you may be able to dimly recall the world before Star Wars. But that guy in the cubicle next to you at work, the one born in 1980 who is married with two kids and a mortgage? He hasn't got a clue.

Creating good guys and bad guys was Hollywood old hat. Believably placing them in alien locales, in highly-detailed spaceships or aboard a killer space station the size of a small moon -- one riven with seemingly bottomless, non-OSHA-compliant canyons and ledges -- seemed nothing short of miraculous.

About that tractor beam control...
From Starlog issue 14, June 1978

Light sabers crackled and hummed. Blasters blasted. X-wing and TIE fighters pitched, yawed and rolled with the maneuverability of F-15 fighters without the aid of CGI graphics.

All this sprung from the imagination of auteur George Lucas, his team of artists and a company called Industrial Light & Magic, accompanied by the iconic symphonic score of composer John Williams.

But to experience it, you had to go to the movies.

Some folks did just over and over and over again, trading the visceral newness for intimate familiarity with Luke Skywalker and Princess Leia, with Han Solo and Chewbacca, with Obi Wan Kenobi and Darth Vader, and for their favorite scenes and lines.

But, then what?

I have a very bad feeling about this.

It would be five years before Star Wars' release on VHS, or cable TV. Longer for the broadcast networks.  So, where did one turn to get that feeling anew? Other media, of which there was plenty.

Star Wars -- the Book

Help me Obi Wan Kenobi. You're my only hope.

Del Rey, a Ballantine Books imprint, actually beat Star Wars to the theaters, publishing its first paperback edition in 1976. Subtitled, "From the Adventures of Luke Skywalker," and not, "A New Hope," its 220 pages were positively canonical, filled with things implied but not shown on the silver screen, including the Anchorhead reunion of Luke and Biggs Darklighter and Han Solo's encounter with Jabba the Hutt before leaving Mos Eisley.

Wedge has a last name, Antilles. Han seems to have shot Greedo first, but the scene's description is vague. What's clear the Corellian reduced his adversary to "a smoking, slimy spot on the stone floor." Also worth noting: Luke's evident attraction to Leia (a concept not yet rendered icky by exposition in Return of the Jedi) and his X-Wing assignment is Blue 5, not Red.

At the end, Chewie gets a medal too. Justice.

Star Wars -- the Comic Books

I find your lack of faith disturbing.

If the 16 pages of full-color movie stills tucked into the center of the post-release edition paperback weren't enough, Marvel Comics had the perfect cure: the entire film, serially rendered in issues one through six of Star Wars, The Greatest Space Fantasy Film of All."

It was a perfect marriage. The movie, inspired by the Saturday matinee Flash Gordon serials of the 1930s, was already filled with literal and figurative cliff-hangers. Now Marvel offered more of the same, in breathlessly hyperbolic comic book form, illustrating many of those canonical novel scenes omitted from the film.

Ironically, while internally faithful to the original scripture, Marvel's cover art was anything but, depicting scenes that didn't didn't actually happen, or if they did, only allegorically. Not that I cared. It was Star Wars at 30 cents a pop. (Though the comic book series lived on, I stopped at issue six where the movie's story ended.)

Star Wars -- the Soundtrack

Hokey religions and ancient weapons are no match for a good blaster.

John Williams was a rock star. Not in the literal sense of the word as he made his name as an Academy Award-winning composers of classical movie sound tracks, but boy, could he write a memorable score. Jaws was his. Raiders of the Lost Ark too, along with Close Encounters of the Third Kind, ET - The Extra-Terrestrial and Superman - The Movie.

The double-album came with liner notes, and

a color poster of the climactic battle over the Death Star

If you can hear any of that music in your head, the credit belongs to him.

Still, Star Wars' symphonic score is in a class of its own, durable, instantly recognizable music, whose place in musical pop culture is renewed with every new installment. The American Film Institute named it as the greatest film score of all time.

All. Time.

And it's not just the fanfare that people recognize. Princess Leia had a theme of her own, as did Ben and Luke. Even Ben's death (non-spoiler alert 1) and the ensuing escape from the Death Star (non-spoiler alert 2) are recognizable.

The soundtrack album itself was something of an artifact even back in 1977, as it hearkened to a technology falling out of favor even then. The first disc featured sides 1 and 4, while the second had sides 2 and 3. Why? Because some phonographs had the ability to play records sequentially, holding one atop of the spindle while the other spun on the turntable below. When side 1 ended, the tone-arm swung clear, side 2 dropped and the arm moved back into playing position. Once done, all a listener had to do was flip the stack so that side 3 dropped down while side 4 waited above.

Oh... and the Star Wars long player came with this poster.

You're all clear kid! Now let's blow this thing and go home.

In addition to its four beloved sequels, three tolerated prequels and one kick-ass feature-length digression, the original Star Wars spawned an empire of Kenner action figures, Lego sets, The Clone Wars, posters, books, more books. t-shirts, pajamas, parodies, more parodies, still more silliness, Halloween costumes and masks.

President Ronald Reagan, himself a product of the Hollywood Dream Factory, probably did as much as anyone to hammer the movie into the American consciousness, borrowing it's "evil empire" theme and applying it to the old Soviet Union, then turning to a still-unrealized missile defense system immediately dubbed "Star Wars."

The force will be with you, always.

-- Follow me on Twitter @paperboyarchive

KISS Transformed! Marvel Comics Gives the Hard Rock Gods the Superhero Origin Story They Deserve

ALL THE GREAT SUPERHEROES have great back stories, origin stories: tales of blood and self-sacrifice and of science gone wrong.

Rock and roll heroes. Comic book heroes.

Superman was sent to Earth by his parents from the dying planet Krypton. Peter Parker was bitten by a radioactive spider. Doc Bruce Banner, belted by gamma rays, turned into the Hulk and Bruce Wayne, eyewitness to his wealthy parents' murder, became the crime-fighting vigilante Donald Trump Batman.

But what about those heroes with mythic garb, great powers and guitars? What about KISS?

Born out of the New York City glam rock scene in 1973, the quartet -- Gene Simons on bass, on rhythm guitar Paul Stanley, on lead guitar Ace Frehley and the drummer, Peter Criss -- adopted outlandish on-stage persona: silver-trimmed black platform shoes, skin-tight costumes and full facial makeup that transformed them into the fire-spewing Demon, Starchild, Space Ace and Catman.

Within three years, the band released six albums with dynamic titles like "Hotter Than Hell," "Dressed to Kill," "Destroyer" (which included a love song called "Beth," their first top 10 hit), and "Rock and Roll Over."  But it was in in-concert double-LP "Alive!" -- featuring the timeless anthemic "Rock and Roll All Night" -- that launched them into the stratosphere.

Stanley, Criss, Frehley
and Simmons give blood
for the cause.

Membership in the Kiss Army fan club exploded. There were t-shirts to be worn, posters to be hung, lunch boxes to brandish, but something was missing: a backstory worthy of their renown.

Enter Marvel Comics.

While not yet the multi-media behemoth it became as part of the Disney empire, the 1970s saw Marvel's superhero stable ascendant. While the more staid DC comics universe still heavily relied on its Batman/Superman - Gotham/Metropolis polarity, Marvel's marvels were flawed, quirky, quarrelsome, sarcastic and self-deprecating. Some came from places you could actually visit, like Queens.

Now, the real life NYC denizens known as KISS would become part of that fantastical world. Their birthplace: a photo booth in the authentic Times Square arcade, Playland.

"A Marval Comics Super Special!" a first-of-its-kind magazine-sized publication, hit the news stands early in 1977. "Forty pages of full-color comics. Plus never-before-published photos and features. Printed in real KISS blood." 

Shout it out loud, indeed. Inside, this story:

"Heads up Flaming Youth! Hither cometh they destiny!" an old, blind man, being attacked by sidewalk thugs, shouts at the passing Stanley and Simmons before hurling to them a cube later identified as the Box of Khyscz.

Pursued into Playland, where they were already headed to meet Frehley and Criss, the foursome duck into the booth to pry open the box. Inside are three wood-carved figures and black star -- the Talismans of Khyscz -- that instantly transform whoever holds them. Moments later... "in a paroxysm of thunder and lightening"... BOOM!*

And there they were.

Catman pouncing, Demon spitting flames, Star Child searing a man's soul and Space Ace teleporting them all to the momentary safety of Battery Park, where they soon met the man claiming ownership of the Box of Khyscz, the Monarch of Latveria: Dr. Victor Von Doom.

The Wrath of Dr. Doom.

Through time and space they traveled, across pages and pages of adventure studded with cameos by Marvel A-list-ers: Spider-Man, the Fantastic Four and the Avengers, plus the devil himself and a thuggish, jealous feline gangster, before their climactic confrontation with Dr. Doom in Chapter IV: "See Latveria and Die!"**

Forty years later, amid line-up changes and reformations, in make-up and not, KISS endures.

In 2014, they were inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame.

Their comic book debut: a keeper.

-- Follow me on Twitter @paperboyarchive

* For those who dispute the educational value of comic books, I note the vocabulary-building word choice.

** Vaguely Baltic-sounding, Latveria may or may not have been an amalgam of Latvia and one of its neighbors, Lithuania or Estonia and may not have been under Soviet influence.

Sex and the Spider-Man

PETER PARKER was my hero.

It wasn't just because he was a geeky kid like me -- but better at math and science -- who suddenly had great powers and the concomitant great responsibility. And it wasn't just because he had super strength, could climb walls and shoot sticky web stuff from gadgets on his wrists (though I spent more time than I should have, strictly speaking, trying to figure out how to make my own web shooters).

Mary Jane and what's his name

It wasn't even that he could afford to live in New York City, the albeit scary 1970s version, on a freelance photo journalist's income because at nine, 10 or 11 years old, I didn't think about those things.

It was because this transformed super-geek was able to date hot babes, stacked, brick house babes a pre-pubescent ordinary geek like me could only think about and never possess.

Never, ever, ever.*

First there was the gorgeous, platinum blonde Gwen Stacy.

Sweet Gwen, with her headbands, short skirts and gogo boots, murdered by the original Green Goblin, Norman Osborn, right before he accidentally killed himself.

Parker, my grieving hero, immediately found comfort in the arms of fiery red-headed Mary Jane Watson. Now there, THERE, was a woman. They went out. They dated. I -- the vicarious, invisible, third wheel -- tagged along.

One night, Peter Parker took her back to his place and...

KARA--BOOM! (No, really, that's what it said right in the bottom panel of page 3 of The Amazing Spider-Man, number 136.)

Kara-boom!?! Well, yes.

An explosion. Peter's place was laid waste by a bomb planted by Norman Osborn's son, Harry, who was going through a bad phase.

The Green Goblin was alive. Sort of. Thirteen issues later, so was Gwen Stacy (T.A.S-M, 149). And she was naked.

Naked! Like, close the door, somebody might see, nude! Holy f*ck!

It was Autumn, 1975. Normal kids were probably watching Carl Yastrzemski, Fred Lynn and the Red Sox or Pete Rose, Joe Morgan and the Big Red Machine. I've read they played one heck of a World Series. Carlton Fisk willed a foul ball into a home run.

I missed it. I had other priorities.

Gwen. Gwen! (Shh... wait, I hear somebody coming up the stairs. Close the door!).

The stuff that pre-adolescent dreams are made of

Man, she was beautiful and, in retrospect, tastefully rendered. Just enough play of light and shadow to leave most everything to the imagination. I had one. It worked really really well.

Suddenly my comic book was contraband, right up their with dad's copies of Playboy and the cheaper, more explicit knockoffs occasionally brandished by my delinquent friend around the corner.

Turns out Gwen was cloned by some heartbroken college science professor who never got over her death. Said professor was a bit off, given to emotional outbursts, enamored of his godliness and -- driven mad by guilt after accidentally killing a colleague -- transformed into some evil, clone-happy critter who called himself the Jackal.

(So much death, grief and madness in this Marvel universe. It was like a Russian lit class, only you know, fun and with pictures.)

He cloned Spider-Man, kidnapped his boss and ultimately died along with one of the homo-arachnae when he blew up the scoreboard at Shea Stadium. (Mets finished third that year). Deliberately left vague: which version of Peter Parker lived and which perished in the blast.

Gwen Stacy Mark II had seen enough to know that maybe paling around with either one wasn't good for her health. She split.

Peter -- one of them at least -- went home to Mary Jane, saying he had something to show her.

Some guys had all the luck.

*  At least not until I met my wife.

Meanwhile, high above the East River...

MAY 17 MARKED the 40th Anniversary of the Roosevelt Island Tram, a cable car spanning the East River between the slender strip of land named for America's 32nd president and that crowded, villain infested-yet-superhero-protected place known as Metropolis, Gotham City, Manhattan.

"Launched as a temporary transportation measure until the F subway line would be routed to the newly residential island, the Roosevelt Island tram soon became an icon of the fledgling community. As the nations's first commuter aerial tram, it carries thousands to work and school on Manhattan and then back home to their Island residences daily, initially for 25 cents,'' says a website commemorating the 100th birthday of urban visionary and activist Jane Jacobs.

Apparently there was a ceremony.

I was not there. Perhaps, in some attendee's mind, these fellows were. -- ah

T.A.S-M, Punisher and Nightcrawler, Nov. 1976