The 600th issue of MAD magazine reaches subscribers and retailers this week with a sporty cover by my partner in crime, Sergio Aragonés. Sergio, you may be interested to know, first had cartoons in MAD #76 and he's been in every issue but for one since and his "streak" is at 488 consecutive issues and counting. The runner-up is writer Dick DeBartolo whose run of consecutive issues stands at 459. I have had material in, depending how you count, either one or two issues but I haven't given up host of overtaking both of them someday.
This #600 is the August issue of MAD. It says June in the upper right hand corner of the cover but that's wrong. MAD, like most periodicals, is dated ahead and always has been. The first issue reached newsstands on July 10, 1952 and it was the October-November issue. One of its former Associate Editors, Jerry DeFuccio, once said — and I have no idea where he got this — that Harvey Kurtzman began work on that first issue in March of 1952. I was also born in March of 1952 and that can't possibly be a coincidence, right?
For those who are puzzled, here's how they figure this is the 600th issue. The original numbering of MAD took it through issue #550, which was the April, 2018 issue and the last to be produced out of an office in New York City. The Powers That Were Then decided to move the operation to Los Angeles — Burbank, actually — and have a mostly-new staff revamp the magazine. That started with a new #1, which was the June, 2018 issue. This is the fiftieth issue out of that office and as far as I know, 550 + 50 = 600.
The magazine has been mostly reprints for the last few years and the last time I looked, they still didn't credit anyone in the staff box as Editor. But a fine crew does a fine job of selecting old MAD articles for reuse and some of them are meaningful in a new way in a new era. Each issue also has a new cover and a number of new pages within and this one has more than most lately.
It originally cost 25 cents per issue and it now costs $5.99. Donald Trump has promised to lower the price back to a quarter or, as he calls it, a 600% price reduction. (No, I'm sorry. That's Fake News. He didn't promise that. But he has promised a lot of things that are equally likely.)
I have always loved MAD through its good years and bad. The current issues, because very little that's new or timely appears within them might be called "bad" by some but they're full of enough good stuff that even though I have a complete collection in the next room — assuming that guy didn't steal it — I still enjoy paging through each new issue. I hope someday MAD will contain all or mostly-new material again and I can write something more for it and pursue my dream of topping Sergio's streak or at least DeBartolo's. True, Sergio has a lead on me of 521 or 522 issues, depending on how you count, but I still think he's catchable.