Yes, there were local versions! Sverre Helmer Christensen was a notorious Danish underground comic artist who I know got published in Norwegian MAD. My parents

Yes, there were local versions! Sverre Helmer Christensen was a notorious Danish underground comic artist who I know got published in Norwegian MAD. My parents were friends of his parents, and I remember they bought that issue. I remember his parents as a mild-mannered couple, and I wonder how their oldest son turned out to be such an outrageous shock artist. Not that it appeared to phase them at all, they were very proud of him. Sadly Sverre died of leukaemia at the age of 30, but I recently learned he was the main inspiration for my favourite current Norwegian underground comics artist, Jens K. Styve. I think that of the different comics traditions that came out of the USA, MAD was one of the greatest and most influential outside it. It was also itself a lot more internationally inclined than the others. They knew and loved the Latin American newspaper comic tradition, and the French comic traditions, at a time when those weren't on many Americans' radars.