U.S. based humor magazine Mad has announced that, due to falling sales and a teetering economy, it will now appear quarterly instead of monthly. The magazine has published cutting-edge satire since its 1952 founding by Harvey Kurtzman and William Gaines, but like the rest of the print industry has seen profits grow increasingly scarce. Mad has never accepted advertising money, depending instead on newsstand and subscription sales. It seems unlikely that policy will change now, partially because accepting ad money can handcuff satirists when they find themselves unable to skewer corporate benefactors. Editor John Ficarra responded to the crisis in typically Mad fashion, saying, “The feedback we’ve gotten from readers is that only every third issue of Mad is funny. So we decided to just publish those.”
