MKM is the abbreviation for Mein Komedy Magazine. Dreamed up during a combat deployment to the Middle East, it started as just the whimsical notion that a comical spin on the book Mein Kampf ought to be made. Who better than to make such a work than the front-lines Marines who also happened to be artistically inclined? (And to be clear, MKM is not an attempt to make the plot of Mein Kampf humorous; MKM is a comical way of showing the creative process that developed and matured during and due to combat stresses, having nothing to do with the viewpoints of its namesake author at all.)
My team and I were securing several Iraqi cities and towns at the time, Faluja (the way it is spelled on some of the street signs over there; alternatively: Fallujah) being one of them. Our overall mindset was one of urgency; we knew that we might die at any moment, so there was no reason for us to hold anything back. Thus, our wildest and darkest humor poured forth with ease, right along with everything else; we created new songs and musical compositions, comic strips, theories, controversial articles, you name it. Near-death experiences, especially when they last for years, have a way of doing that to a people; it amplifies and extracts who you already really are deep inside.
For the duration of our first deployment, a lot of material quickly built up, including the first few comic strip series, and several comic-like singles. Volunteers started coming out of the proverbial woodwork, having heard of the fun pass-time between patrols and other missions. It was easy to connect with those fellow artists back then; we all wanted an outlet from the day-to-day preparation of cleaning, drills, and bullshit. And after all that art came in this initial tidal wave of input and interest, the sense of purpose and value came next; a few of us realized we were onto something, and that the material was really of a special and marketable quality.
Years went by, as did other deployments, and the volunteers started to thin out, the focus shifting not to showing the first issue’s pre-published –and very raw– material to our fellow warriors, but instead to polishing up what we had collected and approved, keeping in line with the theme from the vision. Eventually, MKM went underground for a few years, and all might have seemed lost… except that I was keeping it alive and well, in secret where it belonged for the time, working out the final technicalities of completing its projected seasons of numerous issues, including understanding the legalities of distributing such an edgy composition. MKM showed a lot of promise, but that included promise of us getting hate-mail, death-threats, and summons for many lawsuits filed against us, all the usual trolls lining up to abuse their rights to sue. The ‘free world’ we had fought for during those deployments overseas had gotten way out of hand, and we now had to prepare to fight all the rest of it, too.
Fast-forward the final few years; a decade had gone by since the first comic had been drawn, the name –MKM– coined and agreed upon. Content for 90 issues spanning 6 whole seasons had come together brilliantly. Compared to the very first issue’s content of just a few scribbles and short black-and-white hand-drawn comics on notebook paper, the completed MKM now includes all of the following:
- actual advertisements people will be interested in
- advertisement parodies
- articles
- artwork
- colored comic strips
- meme favorites
- music, when applicable to the general theme of each issue
- news told from a truly objective point of view, nothing like you see on TV
- notes from the MKM staff
- shameless mockeries of the ridiculous stories and media-flooding so many are being fed
- video albums
It was just a matter of finding a publisher ballsy enough to take and run with all that. That publisher, logic and fate would have it, would have to be me. Teaching myself how to self-publish, I made a place for MKM to be mentioned on an earlier website, then ensured there would be endless room for it to grow here at this new one. And there you have it; all that artistic and controversial work building up ever since our time on the edge of Faluja is now available right here for you to browse through and enjoy at your leisure.
What’s in store for tomorrow, though? What do the next few –or many– years have in store for Mein Komedy Magazine? My new team and I are already looking at the details of options to mass-produce hard-copies of it right in our sustainable pollution-free community, Inisfree. You may be seeing printed, physical, holdable versions of it in stores near you. One way or another, we’ll get it into tangible circulation.
Sincerely,
Austin Bunton, senior content contributor & Chief Editor of MKM
