Tyler Sticka

MAD’s going quarterly (What, Me Worry?)

I was saddened to hear today that after years of sagging sales, MAD Magazine is going quarterly (and all spin-off titles are getting the axe). While Peanuts was my first love in comics, MAD was assuredly my second. It was satirical but not pretentious, naughty but not malicious. With cartoonists as amazing as Sergio Aragonés, Antonio Prohias, Don Martin, Al Jaffee, Jack Davis, Harvey Kurtzman, Mort Drucker and many more represented therein, MAD ensured itself a dedicated section of my bookshelf that exists to this day.

That being said, the change is understandable and more than a little expected. With the exception of a year or so in high school, I’ve never been a subscriber. I was introduced to MAD through my dad, who enjoyed both the magazine and pocket books as a kid, and encouraged by my mom, who tolerated many quests through used book stores searching for volumes which lay undiscovered. While modern films were being parodied in it’s pages, I was reading older back-issues from the book’s heyday. As great as many of the contemporary artists are, they’ve always felt foreign next to my yellowed, dog-eared copies of Captain Klutz, and parodies of Harry Potter have always seemed less like a private joke between the artist and I than did old satires of the Godfather series, Star Trek and M*A*S*H.

The more obvious issue is that of online competition. In an age of Pitchfork Media and IGN, it seems absolutely comical that I ever paid for copies of SPIN and Game Informer. I still believe that MAD offers a level of quality cartooning largely unparalleled on the web, but sites like YouTube are overflowing with the sort of irreverence and subversiveness that was once the source of MAD’s immediate appeal.

Mark Evanier is right when he says that the brand and personality of MAD are still too valuable to die quietly. While there are a plethora of well-written comics online, very few of them are also well-drawn. If MAD could capture the web’s attention while maintaining the standard of cartooning readers have enjoyed for over 50 years, we’d be the “gang of idiots” for not reading.

Art as conversation and the power of cartooning

I was grinning ear-to-ear as I walked up to Sergio Aragonés at this year’s San Diego Comic-Con, opened the souvenir book to a page of the Groo 25th Anniversary section and proudly proclaimed “I drew this.”

Sergio was one of the first cartoonists I had been exposed to outside the traditional newspaper page, initially by my father who helped me a acquire a second-hand copy of the paperback In MAD We Trust! While many of my tastes have changed since, I’ve never lost my love for Sergio’s deceptively economic line work and an impeccable ability to distill basic human nature and emotion to its most effective (and humorous) form.

Cartooning is powerful and possesses a uniquely universal resonance because it focuses on the important aspects of an object and omits what isn’t relatable. As Scott McCloud said in his fantastic book Understanding Comics, “By stripping down an image to its essential ‘meaning,’ an artist can amplify that meaning in a way that realistic art can’t.”

Though my opinions are constantly evolving, I’ve recently noticed that this philosophy carries through all aspects of the aesthetic works I enjoy. While I can admire the craft evident in representational artworks (especially that of David and da Vinci), I gravitate much more powerfully toward modern art movements such as impressionism, cubism, expressionism, futurism and modernism itself. While I attempt to maintain a fairly eclectic collection of music, I am hopelessly enthralled with rock and roll.

What do cartooning and animation in visual entertainment, modernism in art and design and rock and roll in music all have in common? All three respect a conversational view of art and communication. Purely representational works are mind-blowing for the events they describe and their impeccable level of detail, but they allow little room for personal interpretation. On the opposite side of the spectrum, more arbitrary works operating on pure expressiveness provide little foothold for comprehension. Conversational artworks are those possessing enough elements to interest, inform and/or enlighten the viewer, but with enough mystique that the audience might impart their own experiences and insight.

Like any good conversation, the best art is give and take. Of course, I maintain the prerogative to change my mind.