Everyone has their Mad year

There has been a lot of spirited debate over the golden years of Mad Magazine. While nothing will ever be as mind-blowing as those first EC comic issues, the magazine version of Mad produced decades of laffs from the usual gang of idiots.

The most obvious is to say it was during its heights of the 60s and 70s, with its stunning roster of talent. Some would even argue that there is true merit in the ironic 90s era, where all those old legends were fading away, and the magazine started recruiting some truly interesting talent from the alternative comic scene. 

These answers are all wrong - the prime time for Mad was obviously for a couple of months in early 1987, when I was 12 years old. The best version of Mad is always when you are 12 years old.

I know this for a fact, because I still have the Mad issues I bought off those shelves, back in those days. They have been literally read to pieces, but I still have those shaggy copies stored away in a box downstairs.

It was the Aliens cover that got me, and the next issue had Max Headroom in it, which I was inexplicably obsessed with, and I always loved things that made fun of other things I liked.

It was just that level of humour that you want when you're about to head into those anxiety-ridden teen years. Just the right level of disrespect for authority, and you need that when you're 12, and figuring out that your parents don't know shit, and maybe the police aren't always your friend, and it's not enough to go out and throw Molotov cocktails in the street, but you can roar with laughter when the hypocrisy of people on power is pointed out. At 12, Mad just hit the right spot. 

There was still loads of goofy slapstick - Don Martin's work was always a highlight - but even Dave Berg would stick it to the man, in the most polite American middle-class way. (He also drew great looking women, nobody really gives Berg credit for that.)

The strange thing is that  I never had the urge to get any more after those few issues I bought brand new. I had a few older issues from the 1970s, and plenty of the paperback reprints of ancient gags, and I got a couple of super specials around the same time, but that was it. Alfred E Neuman had nothing on the X-Mn or Judge Dredd, and I had all the Mad I really needed.

In the end, the only creator I really followed on from Mad was the wonderful goofball who did the little scribbles in the margins, and that's how I end up with dozens of issues of Groo.

I'm not even sure what the current status of Mad is, but at least I've still got those ratty old issues to share with my kids when they're 12, and they're not sure how to rage at the world, but are starting to recognize that it really can be very, very silly.