The Age of Comics and Mad Magazine

Crunhy Con has a very good post called Comics and cultivating nerd children. It is all about Comic books and that is a tad sad kids do not read them now. I was a big Star Wars, GI Joe , and Green Lantern fan myself. I remember as a kid I wrote the Star Wars comic book people a letter raising the issue that Empire was not run by a bunch of bumbling idiots and perhaps they should win sometimes.

However this part of Rod's piece really struck me because it is a basically a mirror image of me at that age:
The true love of my comics life, though, was Mad magazine. It's the only one of my childhood comics obsessions that I truly believe changed my life, and not just because it turned me into the sort of weirdo Southern child who would drop Yiddish words into everyday conversation for effect. Mad changed me, I think, because it cultivated a deep and lasting sense of irony. Mad was astonishingly subversive, and I ate it up. I didn't know why I loved the Mad view of the world, and why it was so different from what I was growing up with, but I just did. The best thing about being sick as a kid was getting to lie in bed all day with a stack full of Mads that I'd read a thousand times, and going through them once more. I was like a medieval monk with a Psalter, I was.

I loved Mad magazine. It was a pretty fun and even controversal and tad racy magazine for kids at times. However I loved it and much like Rod I would read Mad all day long. I was in my local Brookshires grocery store last Sunday and I was a glad to see it still produced.

It was also political and really confronted issues such as race, reliogion and the such in a in your face way.