Friday Links

As you may have heard, Al Feldstein, the long time editor of Mad Magazine, has died. He was 88 at the time of his death, but during his life, he edited the humor rag during its heyday from 1955 to 1984. Since we’re big Springsteen fans, we direct your attention to the cover above, that of Mad Magazine #270, which is a parody of the Live/1975–85 box set. That issue was published in 1987, just a few years after Feldstein retired from the publication.

Back in April 2011, in an edition of Friday Links, we here at Abnormal Use featured Mad Magazine #274 (cover pictured above) as our legally themed comic book cover of the week. Yes, as you can see, at the time of that issue’s publication (1987, again), the magazine was parodying “L.A. Law,” the then-popular legal drama. Of that cover, we said:

We recently realized that most newly minted lawyers are now too young to remember watching “L.A. Law” when it originally aired back in the late 1980s and early 1990s. This is sad news. How is it that a practicing lawyer can be unaware of the fictional exploits of the McKenzie Brackman firm? Was it that long ago in the past when the show left the airwaves in 1994? Was it that many years ago that the Rosalind Shays character perished by falling down an elevator shaft? So, what can we do but commemorate this program by sharing with you the cover of Mad Magazine #274, published way back in 1987? (An aside: One of the writer contributors of this blog actually bought this issue off the newsstand back in ’87, but we’re not going to tell you which one of us it was so as to protect the innocent.).

Indeed, we here at Abnormal Use became familiar with Mad Magazine back in the mid-1980’s, well after it was an institution. It was certainly superior to the other fad of the time: Garbage Pail Kids. By the 1990’s, though, we had left comic books and Mad Magazine behind, so we missed the legally themed cover to issued #322, published way, way back December 1994 and pictured below:

Mad Magazine on the O.J. Simpson trial? We might have to make our way to eBay to find a copy of that one (if only to learn why Marcia Clark appears to be introducing a photograph of famed magazine mascot Alfred E. Neuman as an exhibit to the proceedings). Yes, yes, we realize that if offering this tribute to Mr. Feldstein that we only displayed Mad Magazine covers from the late 1980’s and early 1990’s (after his tenure). So, today, in honor of Mr. Feldstein, head on over to Mad Magazine‘s official website, or if you’d like to stroll down memory lane, to Comicvine, where you can access images of all of Mad Magazine‘s covers all the way back to the 1950’s.