Gene Simmons

If you use your imagination, it's actually not that far-fetched to consider that the clean-cut lads on the bottom are really Peter Criss, Ace Frehley, Gene Simmons and Paul Stanley. Harry North illustrated the "two faces of Kiss" for the Larry Siegel article "Handicaps In Other Fields," which originally ran in MAD #195 (December '77).

Oh, come on - I couldn't let Gene Simmons' birthday go by without another look at MAD's parody of Detroit Rock City, the ill-fated Kiss vanity flick he co-produced in 1999. The movie bombed but the spoof was a MAD milestone, the first full-length movie satire for both writer Desmond Devlin and artist Ray Alma. And...psst...notice something different about this scan of the "Detroit Rock Sissies" splash panel? I get Desmond to autograph it when I met him last year during my visit to the MAD offi

And here's Gene Simmons' most recent appearance in MAD, as illustrated by Glenn Fabry. Associate Editor Jacob Lambert conceived this Watchmen parody for the 2008 MAD 20 Dumbest list (#497, January '09), and it was also reprinted in the 2012 60th-anniversary anthology Totally MAD.

Believe it or not, Don Martin actually got one of MAD's first cracks at Gene Simmons and Kiss, caricaturing the band in the bottom left-hand corner of one of two Martin posters that appeared in MAD Super Special #25 (Fall '78).

Jack Rickard's cover art for the 1982 Tom Koch paperback The MAD Weirdo Watcher's Guide included an Alfred-ized version of Gene Simmons in his Kiss makeup. (And, now that I look at it again, the woman next to Alfred/Gene looks astonishingly like Blondie lead singer Debbie Harry...)