As you damn well know, MAD magazine has fallen on hard times. Not that long ago, they moved it from New York to Los Angeles, rebooted it, redesigned it, announced it was ceasing publication, then decided to keep publishing but to lower its budget…and here is its current status as of a few days ago: They are still putting it out but it's almost all reprints. There are new covers and a few new pages inside each issue but it's almost all recycled material. And whereas they used to "colorize" a lot of the pieces that had previously run in black-and-white, the mag is moving back towards all black-and-white as it was for so many years.
At the moment, no change to this seems to be in the offing. Nevertheless, I am still predicting — based on no inside info whatsoever — that someone in the corporation will someday say, "We can't let it end like this. The name alone is too valuable for us to allow it to wither and die" and they'll do something. What, I don't know and they don't know. But they'll do something to try and raise MAD from its near-death state.
In the meantime, a lot of veteran MAD contributors have some free time on their hands. The best movie parodies that have appeared in the magazine, lo this past decade or so, were written by Desmond Devlin and drawn by Tom Richmond. They see no reason why, just because their magazine has been driven to near-oblivion, they should stop doing what they do so well. So they are producing Claptrap, a book of all-new parodies of recent films and some that MAD spared in years past.
It's being crowdfunded and perhaps you know my position on crowdfunding. If you don't want to click that link, I'll summarize: Way too often, they take your money and fail to deliver what they promised.
But as I say in that piece, I don't promote or order any crowdfunded item "unless it's the endeavor of someone I know really, really, really well." I know Tom Richmond "really, really, really well." I only know Desmond a little but this is good enough for me. You might be interested to read Tom's views on crowdfunding which you can do over on this page of his blog.
By now, you're probably ready to go order a copy of this book and if so, don't let me stop you. But just in case you need to hear more, here are Desmond and Tom explaining all about their project. I think it's well-worth supporting…