Thread by @AlexandraErin

Just randomly remembered back when I had a subscription to Mad Magazine and they sent it in a protective cover that read "HERE IS THE PORNOGRAPHY YOU ORDERED IN A BROWN PAPER COVER".

Mad Magazine existed in large part because anti-Semites tried to run highly successful comic book publisher William M. Gaines out of the business, but the moral panic they used didn't cover magazines.

It wasn't the only factor behind the Comics Code targeting of EC Comics nor was censorship of comics the only reason Mad became a magazine (the prestige of helming a magazine was a perk for an editor who had been offered a position elsewhere)... but it helped cement things.

The two most enduring legacies of EC Comics are Mad Magazine and Tales from the Crypt. Most discussion of Wertham/Comics Code attacks on EC focus on the shock/schlock horror of Tales from the Crypt and its sibling publications, but EC also published Twilight Zone style sci-fi.

The last proper comic book that EC published was Incredible Science fiction #33, which featured a story called Judgment Day where a human astronaut from a sprawling Galactic Republic rejects a planet as not ready to join when he finds the cybernetic inhabitants have racial castes

At the end of the story, you see the astronaut's face for the first time without his visored helmet on.

If you've ever seen the EC house style, you know it could be lurid and grotesque, but it's a case of different tools for different purposes. This was beautiful.

This was actually a reprint from a pre-Code comic, that was pulled out of the archives when another story was pulled by the Code Authority for being inappropriate.

The judge also objected to Judgment Day, insisting the final panel be changed to make the astronaut white.

There was absolutely nothing in the Comics Code that said you couldn't have a positive portrayal of a Black man or show him in a position of authority. Nothing in it said you couldn't show a Black character being heroic or looking inspiring.

Gaines knew this, and he called up the judge's office and he said that they were going to print it anyway and if the CCA tried to do anything about it he'd go to the press and make them explain what was wrong with the story.

The judge didn't want to admit he was wrong...

...so he tried to extract a concession, said, "You've got to take off the beads of sweat."

Can't have Black people gleaming majestically. Might give the youth ideas.

But Gaines already knew he'd won. He changed nothing.

But you can't run a publishing company if every month, every issue, is a fight against someone who can ruin you. It didn't matter that Gaines was right and Judge Murphy was wrong.

He converted most of his comics to picture books, which failed, and one to magazine, which didn't.

"Moral panics"... they're often, and in fact almost always, racist backlashes. The moral panic over rock 'n' roll was about "ethnic" music becoming accessible to and appealing to white teenagers.

The moral panic over marijuana... I mean, even the name the papers hung on it was Spanish. Who's going to be afraid of a little pot, a little hash, a little grass, a little weed, a bit of reefer?

But tell White Middle America that THE DEVIL MARIHUANA is coming for their kids...

And the image of the harm that drugs would do their children... it involved imagery like "your daughters will wind up going to mixed parties where jungle music will raise their libidos and foreign drugs will lower their inhibitions. They might take up with... anybody."

The Mann Act is a law that makes it a federal crime to take a woman or girl across state lines for (very ill-defined) immoral purposes.

At its inception, it was also called "the White-Slave Traffic Act".

So you know who it was meant to protect, and who it was meant to punish.

A lot of early 20th century panic over "white slavery" was actually a reaction to the fact that white women were increasingly free to move around and to conduct their own affairs without chaperones.

The idea that there wasn't much premarital sex before then is largely retroactive mythmaking, but nobody cared about the prospect of a little trial period when it was between white neighbors.

Scratch a moral panic, and you will find racist fearmongering over the purity of the white race.

Heck, even Wertham's "Batman and Robin are turning young men gay!" was just an earlier incarnation of the propaganda that "globalists" are using media propaganda to feminize the west in order to drive down white birthrates...

...which is part and parcel of the myth of white genocide and the "Great Replacement" conspiracy theory that explicitly got so many people hurt and killed in El Paso, Christchurch, and elsewhere.

Returning to the subject of Mad Magazine, by the way: two of their long-running featured cartoonists came to this country speaking little to no English.

Antonio Prohías was a Cuban refugee who showed up unannounced and hoped for the best, with some strips about dueling spies.

And Sergio Aragonés, a child of Spaniards who had grown up in Mexico... the staff found him to be such a fast and prolific artist who produced such an enormous quantity of comic gold on the regular, they just basically let him draw on every page that he wanted to.

Mad had always tried to squeeze extra jokes to fill up dead space in the panel layouts, so his "audition tape" was an issue of the magazine where he'd drawn wicked clever little cartoons in the margins, sometimes playing with the page layout in meta ways.

Before that nobody had actually liked the job of filling up the dead space, and it was usually pithy quotes or one-liners because if the space were big enough for a cartoon, they'd have put a cartoon there.

But Aragonés, a polyglot who had already changed countries once in early childhood, had a genius for communicating wordlessly and an artistic gift for drawing in miniature.

Prohías's Spy vs. Spy was also a pantomime stripe, using evocative cartooning techniques to convey action, and action to tell a story.

It was also wickedly subversive for a cold war era comic strip made by a man fleeing a Communist regime.

Two sides, one dressed in white and one dressed in black, but no hero and no villain. No rhyme or reason to who's going to win, and of course, no victory would ever be permanent.

I don't want to make it sound like Mad Magaze was some kind of perfectly progressive wonderland of perfectly correct multicultural liberal attitudes... because, I mean, that doesn't actually exist.

They did plenty of punching down in their days.

Mad Magazine is on my very complicated list of things that helped me realize being trans was a thing back before the internet, because of course the nebulous, unfathomable intersection of gay/crossdresser/shemale is COMEDY GOLD, amirite?

I learned the actual plot of Silence of the Lambs (beyond what I heard through cultural osmosis, which was, "He eats people, he cuts off a guy's face to wear it, and at the end he says he's having a friend for dinner.") from a Mad Magazine parody of it...

...and while Silence is far from perfect on trans issues, either, the fact that Mad Magazine told me a thing existed that told a serious story in which transsexualism wasn't just the punchline to a joke about a gay guy being extra gay really changed everything for me.

Sidenote to a thread made up of sidenotes: this is why I will never, ever side with "these kids learn about being trans from the internet, it's cultural contagion, and also they take it way too far".

I had to learn about transness from Mad, Night Court, and Silence of the Lambs

The news about Mad Magazine closing dropped while I was in the middle of grieving my mother, and so I haven't really processed it until today, when I happened to think of the plain brown wrapper.

Anyway.

RIP, Mad Magazine.

Take it for all in all.

It walked so that Cracked could fall on its face, pick itself up, and relaunch itself in a newer and more powerful form.