My Life In Mad Magazine Covers

This is the perhaps too-clever cover of Mad Magazine from July 1954, the month that I was born.  If my Dad had stepped out from the delivery room for a breath of fresh air and happened across a newsstand, this is the cover he would have seen.  If they had brought my Mom some magazines to read while she was recovering, they might have brought her this (probably not, though).  

Anyway, as a young boy, I found Mad's combination of satire and know-it-all attitude irresistible, and read it voraciously between the ages of, oh, 9 and 14.

By the time I turned 18, Mad Magazine was already passe to me, children's stuff, not worthy of my time.  I would more likely have been reading Rolling Stone, or Cream, or the Village Voice, or any one of a number of "radical" "underground" newspapers.  In any event, if I had gone out to a newsstand on my 18th birthday to buy any of the above, this would have been the cover of the Mad Magazine I'd have passed over.

By the time I turned 21, I would more likely have been reading the now-defunct Boston Phoenix or it's rival weekly, the long-defunct Real Paper, than the issue of Mad Magazine above.

By my 30th birthday, I was living in Atlanta and would have been consulting Creative Loafing instead of any Bostonian newspaper for local music and film listings, but in any event this was the cover of Mad Magazine on the day I turned 30.

Anyone over 30 still reading Mad is either a creep or mentally deficient, but the magazine covers on my 40th birthday and my 50th birthday can serve as barometers of the popular zeitgeist of their times.

Actually, the amazing thing is the unlikely fact that the magazine has remained in publication over the duration of my lifetime, and the sad thing is the sobering realization that it will most likely out-live me.