Follow TV Tropes

This is based on opinion. Please don't list it on a work's trope example list.

Following

Nightmare Fuel / MAD

Go To

The magazine

https://static.tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pub/images/screenshot_20230205_1101182.png
To think chimps like Travis were able to Tear Off Your Face.
  • Many of the Michael Gallagher/Tom Bunk one-page gags employ this, particularly with Bunk's over-the-top grotesque and gory artnote . For instance:
    • A kid pops a zit and ends up swallowed by his own pus and gore.
    • As seen at Agony of the Feet, man buys magnetic insoles for his shoes which are so strong that they pull an entire shelf full of sharp knives down through his feet, followed by an entire refrigerator crushing him to death.
    • Rock music fans try to crash a concert by pushing a chain link fence down. However, the fence is so heavily reinforced that it just slices their bodies to smithereens instead.
    • A nurse is drawing blood from a patient, but gets distracted by a phone call. When she returns, the patient is dead and dried-out, and their IV bag is gushing blood.
  • There's also the illustrations by Basil Wolverton, usually. While still gross, unlike Bunk's reliance on over-the-top gore, many of Wolverton's illustrations are faces or creatures with horribly disfigured or twisted proportions.
  • The very first Mad story ever ends with a man walking away with his own severed head.
  • "I am... a VAMPIRE Batboy!"
  • An off-putting Fold-In, seen in #223 and the Mad Gross-Outs issue, sports the image of a lady whose right side is bare skeleton; the setup is "What is always the movie industry's ghastliest production?"Answer 
  • One of the mags had a back-panel illustration of a nuclear power station going into meltdown, with lava spewing from its cooling towers. In the foreground, a very worried Alfred says, "Yes...Me worry!"
  • The October 2018 edition of the magazine had a good dose of Realism-Induced Horror with "The Ghastlygun Tinies", an "update" on Edward Gorey's The Gashlycrumb Tinies. Instead of telling of kids dying in various ways, it says that kids only seem to die in one way nowadays: school shootings. The story tells more disturbing things happening during the shooting, ending on this note:
    Z is for ZOE, who won't be the last.
    • And if recent trends have shown, the poem, and that particular line, are very accurate.

The animated series

https://static.tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pub/images/screenshot_20230405_122450.png

Top