Mad 海外のプッツン雑誌 その４

The magazine's corporate history

For tax reasons, Gaines sold his company in the early 1960s to the Kinney Parking Company . Kinney was in the process of becoming a conglomerate, including acquiring National Periodicals (aka DC Comics ) and Warner Bros. by the end of that decade. Though technically an employee for 30 years, the fiercely independent Gaines was largely permitted to run Mad without corporate interference.

Following Gaines' June 3 , 1992 death, Mad became more ingrained within the Time Warner corporate structure, which did not share Gaines' idiosyncratic ideas about marketing Mad. Since Time Warner viewed Mad as not unlike a comic book, they turned the magazine over to DC Comics ' publishers Jenette Kahn and Paul Levitz . Kahn and Levitz, in turn, appointed DC Vice President Joe Orlando as the magazine's new Associate Publisher, since Orlando was closely involved with DC licensing. Further, Orlando had been a staff artist with EC Comics in the 1950s and a prolific contributor to Mad during the 1960s and the National Lampoon during the 1970s. Time Warner put a much stronger emphasis on Mad merchandising and licensing, including products for the chain of Warner Studio Stores . Orlando spearheaded that operation through his Special Projects department at DC Comics, and a key component was the creation of the Mad Style Guide (1994), edited by Bhob Stewart with new artwork by Tom Bunk , Sergio Aragonés , Angelo Torres and George Woodbridge .

Eventually, the magazine was obliged to abandon its long-time home at 485 Madison Avenue (very appropriately printed as "MADison" Avenue in the masthead), and in the mid-1990s, it moved into DC Comics' offices at the same time DC relocated to 1700 Broadway . Although Orlando retired from DC Comics in 1996, he continued to maintain an office at Mad until his death in 1998.

In 2001, the magazine broke its long-standing taboo and began running advertising. Today, the magazine is published by a branch of DC Comics and in recent years has used its advertising revenue to increase the use of color and improve the magazine's paper stock.

By early 1978, Mad was obliged to include a UPC symbol on its covers. The magazine responded by devoting the entire front cover of issue #198 to a giant UPC bar code, saying they hoped it would "jam every computer in the country" for "forcing us to deface our covers with this yecchy UPC symbol from now on." For more than two years, subsequent issues labelled the normal-sized symbol with a variety of humorous captions, such as "Closeup of the gap in Alfred E. Neuman's teeth" and "Exclusive! FBI releases Bionic Man's fingerprints!"

The Mad logo has remained virtually unchanged since 1955, save for the decision to italicize the lettering beginning in 1997. The title is sometimes seen in all uppercase letters, but Maria Reidelbach , in her comprehensive, authorized study, Completely Mad: A History of the Comic Book and Magazine (Little, Brown, 1991), makes it clear that the title is correct in upper and lowercase. For many years, the mysterious letters "IND" appeared in small type within the logo, between the M and the A. Sometimes the Mad logo included cavorting centaurs within the lettering, one of whom would be pointing directly at the IND. Though some fans speculated about the secret meaning of the "M-IND" message, the truth was more prosaic: from 1957 on, the magazine was handled by Independent News Distribution.