February 4, 2025

FDBZ

Trailblazing music quality

Did MAD Magazine Publish ‘Super Patriot’ Cartoon in the 1960s?

A cartoon with textual content that commences, “See the Tremendous Patriot,” was printed in MAD journal in the 1960s.

Context

Even though some posts on social media assert the cartoon appeared in the magazine in 1968, it truly transpired the adhering to calendar year.

Truth Verify

An picture supposedly displaying a cartoon from a 1968 challenge of MAD magazine is routinely circulated on the net, often connected to messages expressing dismay that the difficulties of the past are even now the difficulties of right now. The matter of the cartoon is a so-known as “Super Patriot” who loves his country “while hating 93% of the people today who dwell in it.”

The “Super Patriot” cartoon truly appeared in MAD magazine. When this image is routinely shared on-line as if it dates from 1968, the cartoon was essentially published the next calendar year, in 1969.

In accordance to MAD magazine collector Doug Gilford’s web site, Madcoversite.com, the “Super Patriot” cartoon appeared in concern #129 of MAD Journal, launched in September 1969, and beneath a portion titled, “The Mad Primer of Bigots, Extremists, and Other Loose Finishes.” This area was prepared by Frank Jacobs and Stan Hart and featured the artwork of Jack Davis.

The magazine area highlighted 10 chapters (or cartoons) across three webpages that showcased numerous extremists. The “Super Patriot” was the very first chapter in the area. In 2018, comic reserve artist Bruce McCorkindale posted an image on Twitter that confirmed the complete initial web page of this MAD journal entry:

While several of the cartoons in MAD magazine’s “Primer of Bigots” segment criticized proper-wing politics, this sort of as the “Super Patriot” and the “Right-Wing Extremist,” several many others targeted the still left wing of the political spectrum with people like “Yippies” and the “phony liberal.”

A blog site established by a retired librarian and self-explained “comics geek,” 50yearoldcomics.com, mentioned in 2019:

Mad’s primer ‘page’ on the Super Patriot has been extensively shared on the net in the past numerous several years — generally in a ‘the a lot more points change…’ kind of context. And it is not hard to see why. The thoughts ascribed to this determine do, in truth, appear to be to line up with individuals of numerous people today in the current-working day American citizens (while I’d incorporate a caveat that today’s equivalents of the Tremendous Patriot look to have typically gotten more than their disdain for the ‘Very Rich’).

The primer’s fourth chapter, on the Ideal-Wing Extremist, remains timely, as well — though a single of its most placing visual facts may possibly require some historical explanation. Ax handles?

[…]

In any case, primarily based on these two illustrations, all those iconoclastic, skeptical people at Mad have to have been straight-up, dyed-in-the-wool liberals, ideal? Very well, not so rapidly. As Chapter Four’s line about the Appropriate-Wing Extremist sounding “just like a Remaining-Wing Extremist” indicates, the authors of “The Mad Primer of Bigots, Extremists, and Other Loose Ends” discovered fault with extremism at both of those ends of the political spectrum.

Here’s a glance at all 10 illustrations that appeared in the 1969 problem, as section of “The Mad Primer of Bigots, Extremists, and Other Free Ends”:

Previous cartoons usually get circulated anew soon after social media buyers identify the seeming prescience (or enduring relevance) of the original get the job done. For case in point, after Donald Trump was elected as U.S. president, people circulated a 1992 situation of MAD journal that poked fun at him for boasting about his economical achievements even with filing for numerous bankruptcies.

Resources:

Doug Gilford’s Mad Cover Site – Mad #129. https://www.madcoversite.com/mad129.html. Accessed 14 July 2022.

Stewart, Alan. “Mad #129 (September, 1969).” Assault of the 50 Yr Outdated Comic Textbooks, 14 Sept. 2019, https://50yearoldcomics.com/2019/09/14/mad-129-september-1969/.

Chappell, Monthly bill. “Jack Davis, Cartoonist Who Helped Identified ‘Mad’ Magazine, Dies At 91.” NPR, 28 July 2016. NPR, https://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2016/07/28/487804779/jack-davis-cartoonist-who-aided-uncovered-mad-journal-dies.

MAD Remembers Jack Davis, Artist. 27 July 2016, https://www.madmagazine.com/blog site/2016/07/27/mad-remembers-jack-davis-artist.

R.I.P. Stan Hart, MAD Writer. 28 July 2017, https://www.madmagazine.com/site/2017/07/28/rip-stan-hart-mad-author.

Sandomir, Richard. “Frank Jacobs, Mad Journal Author With a Lyrical Contact, Dies at 91.” The New York Instances, 14 Apr. 2021. NYTimes.com, https://www.nytimes.com/2021/04/14/arts/frank-jacobs-useless.html.