Wednesday, May 03, 2006

Ironic T-shirts of the future



Cracked.com, the web off-shoot of Cracked Magazine (a second-rate "Mad" magazine rip-off that was somewhat popular in the 70's/80's) has a story on nostalgic t-shirts of tomorrow. And I was shocked to find that there's actually some funny ones.

Like this one:


Or this one:

And coming from Wisconsin, a land rife with jiggly, blobby people, this one struck a cord:

See the whole list here, or just assume that I've cherry-picked the funniest ones for display, which is indeed what I've done.

This all got me thinking of "Mad" magazine and how awesome it was when I was a kid. In the 60's and 70's "Mad" ruled the schoolyard, and was so popular that a bunch of imitators sprung up, all with a "mental illness"-type angle to their name: Cracked, Crazy, Nuts, Frenzy, Sick, Madhouse, Bughouse and Panic. For the most part they all stunk. But not "Mad." You had top-notch creators like Don Martin, Sergio Aragones, Dave Berg, Mort Drucker, Norman Mingo painting the awesome covers, and my personal favorite, Al Jaffee, creator of the back cover fold-in.

"Mad" actually started as a comic book way back in 1952 and then transitioned to it's current magazine format with its 24th issue in 1955, whereupon it started doing movie parodies and re-occuring features. Purists claim that it stopped being truly revolutionary at this point, but they are wrong. Such talk is merely the ramblings of fat, old smelly guys who fear change, especially, if I can judge by the smells of a comic book convention, that "change" involves clean clothing.

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