Sometime around the age of 5 or 6 back in the 1950s, I unknowingly discovered philosophy, theology, ethics and morality in the form of a bi-monthly comic book — MAD magazine. It was a time in America of the McCarthy hearings when such a thing was viewed as subversive and unpatriotic so much so that many of its readers had to read it at the drugstore or at a friend’s house.

MAD’s publishers just announced that they will close down putting out original material after the next two issues and will cease all operations after their subscription obligations run out. For this ending period, they will be reprinting a best of what they did.

MAD was an important and formative force in my life — a form of thinking outside of myself and the forces that shaped my early years. Yes, I admit that I can’t take too much credit for actually thinking back then.

Six years of age was just old enough to saunter up and down the steep blocks of East North Broadway to either Jimmie’s Drugs on High Street or Brody’s Drugs on Indianola. As I once told my new comic book reading subversives and friends, “Our neighborhood is about a third Catholic, a half Protestant, and 100% boring,” not understanding the categorical mishmash I’d come up with and uttered. Its saving grace to me at least was that it was in the MAD tradition.

Those long ago drugstore magazine aisles were a mess of paperback books, comics, newspapers, magazines, packages of Viewmaster slides, and in some stores, LP records. These stores and MAD introduced me to the existential, the absurd and the hilarious contractions of life — Spy vs. Spy, crazy Don Martin cartoons, and of course “What — me worry?” It was on these stores scuffed floors that I first heard rock and roll, jazz, big band music and early soul music playing on jukeboxes next to the soda fountain counters.

My mind, thus bathed in sonic craziness and rebellion, became a bit disheveled with a hoarder-style mess of ideas and influences. For years my thinking diverged from the neat-as-a-pin construction and tidiness favored by my parents and parochial school teachers. The little piles of alternative takes on American social mores and traditions accumulated on the small tables inside my head.

In retrospect, MAD taught me to silently consider how would it, and by extension should I, treat a current subject. In its madcap free-for-all way, MAD went after phoniness, BS, and hypocrisy. I did so but not as well until I figured out how to do so in a more serious and analytical way.

Only recently have I wished that MAD would stage our Presidential debates — they’d do a bang-up job of getting to the candidates’ core truths and absurdities.

Shoulda, woulda, coulda for sure; but, they will be missed.

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