MAD Magazine No. 292

      Last week I invaded my local comic book store looking for treasures from decades past. I went there hoping that the owners had bought another toy collection since the last time I was there so I could waste my hard-earned money on cheesy action figures for one-time sight gags, but such was not the case. I eventually bought an Admiral Ackbar figure that had been there for months, but I felt rather unfulfilled; I needed to find new and exciting things to buy. Or at the very least, old and exciting to buy. It was at that moment that I decided to head to the back issue room.

The back issue room at Webhead Enterprises is divided into two main parts. First, there's the tables. The tables are home to boxes of carefully alphabetized boxes of back issues of comics that people actually give a shit about: Batman, Spider-Man, Marvel Civil War, that sort of thing. Then there are the boxes UNDER the tables. These boxes are home to a wasteland of failed and forgotten comics, titles like Fish Police and Team America, as well as old magazines. It was in this wasteland, somewhere between Captain Planet and X-Men 2099, that I found a stack of old MAD magazines. As I thumbed through them, I saw the potential for a magazine review. Just as I was about to grab an issue with Gremlins on the cover, something even better caught my eye - Super Mario! I knew at the moment that the January 1990 issue of MAD Magazine would find its way on to my site. How could it not? The cover indicated that there would be parodies of at least three awesome things, so I immediately snatched it up. I didn't know it then, but this would turn out to be a horrible miscalculation on my part; what had the potential to be a hilarious edition of a revered magazine would turn out to be largely awful. The magazine was sealed in a plastic bag, so it's not like I could have thumbed through it out before buying it, but I should have taken a slilghtly better look at the cover. Look at it, who do you see? Mario and Luigi? Wrong. What you see is Mario and a Luigi-colored Mario, they both have fucking M's on their hats for chrissakes! And why the hell are Faux Luigi's shoes green? That's just silly. Dear readers, I implore you, go no further. What follows is a look at a rather formulaic and unfunny issue of a magazine that was once cutting edge. If you ever enjoyed MAD, you will be horribly disappointed by this magazine; close this page now. Or, if you want to satisfy your morbid curiosity, click on that pretty purple link at the bottom of the page.

NEXT