The cover price inevitably went up over the years, but to the Usual Gang of Idiots who produced the magazine, Mad was forever “CHEAP.” As far as I was concerned, it was a steal. On a value-per-laugh basis, Mad couldn’t be beat. Each issue was a satirical horn of plenty, every spread as dense with lunatic detail as the album cover of Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band or Hieronymus Bosch’s The Garden of Earthly Delights.
Mad, which ceased publication in 2018, was the work of many artists, each with his or her (but mostly his) own style. (DC Entertainment relaunched the magazine later that year with a redesigned, bimonthly model.)
