Deutsches MAD II

After reprinting editions of Mad in English, I return to editions in languages not native to the United States, although one of the proposals of the founding fathers was to make German the official language. I printed pages from another German edition here.

Here are some pages from #92, sometime in 1976. This cover says “an honest Christmas card”

It started with the publisher Williams and the tagline “The most reasonable magazine in the world” This is taken from Wally Wood's The Comic Strip Characters' Christmas Party in Mad #68, January 1962, but redrawn to parody their comic strip characters. The German edition instead of reprinting articles redraws them to conform to their own frame of reference. Bud Spencer was sort of their equivalent to Sylvester Stallone. He made many action movies in Europe. The character in the jack-in-the-box is sometime co-star Terrence Hill.

The excerpts here are from #121, around 1979. A common feature our Mad would have is a celebrity appearing in other TV shows and movies. Parodied here are The International Brunch, kind of a Meet the Press with Werner Höfer, their lotto show with Karin Tietze-Ludwig, and I Am a.., an equivalent to What's My Line Literal Ribles and The Word for Sunday. Things That Have Changed is a translation of Remember When... from Mad #168, July 1974. The new art is also credited to the same people so it's possible Bob Clarke did new illustrations just for this. They also did their own version of the American Mad's Fairy Tales parodies, again possibly because the legends are different there. The glass case may be essential to their version of Snow White. Soccer Phrases Taken Literally, a sport extremely popular everywhere but here.