Mad (magazine)

Mad (stylized in all caps) is an American humor magazine which was launched in 1952 and currently published by DC Comics, a unit of the DC Entertainment subsidiary of Warner Bros. Discovery. Mad was founded by editor Harvey Kurtzman and publisher William Gaines, It is the last surviving title in the EC Comics line, which sold Mad to Premier Industries in 1961, but closed in 1956.

Mad publishes satire on all aspects of life and popular culture, politics, entertainment, and public figures. Its format includes TV and movie parodies, and satire articles about everyday occurrences that are changed to seem humorous. Mads mascot, Alfred E. Neuman, is usually on the cover, with his face replacing that of a celebrity or character who is being lampooned. From 1952 to 2018, Mad published 550 regular magazine issues, as well as scores of reprint "Specials", original-material paperbacks, reprint compilation books and other print projects. After AT&T merged with DC's then-owner Time Warner in June 2018, Mad ended newsstand distribution, continuing in comic-book stores and via subscription.

History

thumb|Cover for Mad No. 1

thumb|Issue 24 July 1955. The "extremely important message" was "Please buy this magazine!".

Mad began as a comic book published by EC, debuting in August 1952 (cover date October–November). The Mad office was initially located in lower Manhattan at 225 Lafayette Street, while in the early 1960s it moved to 485 Madison Avenue, the location listed in the magazine as "485 MADison Avenue".

The first issue was written almost entirely by Harvey Kurtzman, and featured illustrations by him, Wally Wood, Will Elder (Also known as Bill Elder), Jack Davis, and John Severin. Wood, Elder, and Davis were to be the three main illustrators throughout the 23-issue run of the comic book.

To retain Kurtzman as its editor, the comic book converted to magazine format as of issue No. 24, in 1955. The switchover induced Kurtzman to remain for one more year, but the move had removed Mad from the strictures of the Comics Code Authority. William Gaines related in 1992 that Mad "was not changed [into a magazine] to avoid the Code" but "as a result of this [change of format] it did avoid the Code." Gaines claimed that Kurtzman had at the time received "a very lucrative offer from Pageant magazine," and seeing as he, Kurtzman, "had, prior to that time, evinced an interest in changing Mad into a magazine," Gaines, "not know[ing] anything about publishing magazines," countered that offer by allowing Kurtzman to make the change. Gaines further stated that "if Harvey [Kurtzman] had not gotten that offer from Pageant, Mad probably would not have changed format."

In its earliest incarnation, new issues of the magazine appeared erratically, between four and nine times a year. By the end of 1958, Mad had settled on an unusual eight-times-a-year schedule, which lasted almost four decades. Issues would go on sale 7 to 9 weeks before the start of the month listed on the cover. Gaines felt the atypical timing was necessary to maintain the magazine's level of quality. Beginning in 1994, Mad then began incrementally producing additional issues per year, until it reached a monthly schedule with issue No. 353 (Jan. 1997). With its 500th issue (June 2009), amid company-wide cutbacks at Time Warner, the magazine temporarily regressed to a quarterly publication before settling to six issues per year in 2010.

Gaines sold his company in 1961 to Premier Industries, a maker of venetian blinds. Around 1964, Premier sold Mad to Independent News, a division of National Periodical Publications, the publisher of DC Comics. In the summer of 1967, Kinney National Company purchased National Periodical Publications. Kinney bought Warner Bros.-Seven Arts in early 1969. As a result of the car parking scandal, Kinney Services spun off of its non-entertainment assets to form National Kinney Corporation in August 1971, and it reincorporated as Warner Communications, Inc. on February 10, 1972. In 1977, National Periodical Publications was renamed DC Comics.

Feldstein retired in 1985, and was replaced by the senior team of Nick Meglin and John Ficarra, who co-edited Mad for the next two decades. Long-time production artist Lenny "The Beard" Brenner was promoted to art director and Joe Raiola and Charlie Kadau joined the staff as junior editors. Following Gaines's death in 1992, Mad became more ingrained within the Time Warner (now WarnerMedia) corporate structure. Eventually, the magazine was obliged to abandon its long-time home at 485 Madison Avenue and in the mid-1990s it moved into DC Comics's offices at the same time that DC relocated to 1700 Broadway. In issue No. 404 of April 2001, the magazine broke its long-standing taboo and began running paid advertising. The outside revenue allowed the introduction of color printing and improved paper stock. After Meglin retired in 2004, the team of Ficarra (as executive editor) Raiola and Kadau (as senior editors), and Sam Viviano, who had taken over as art director in 1999, would helm Mad for the next 14 years.

Throughout the years, Mad has remained a unique mix of adolescent silliness and political humor. In November 2017, Rolling Stone wrote that "operating under the cover of barf jokes, Mad has become America's best political satire magazine." Nevertheless, Mad ended its 65-year run in New York City at the end of 2017 with issue No. 550 (cover-dated April 2018), Bill Morrison was named in June 2017 to succeed Ficarra in January 2018. None of Mads New York staff made the move, resulting in a change in editorial leadership, tone, and art direction. More than a hundred new names made their Mad debuts including Brian Posehn, Maria Bamford, Ian Boothby, Luke McGarry, Akilah Hughes, and future Pulitzer Prize finalist Pia Guerra. Scores of artists and writers from the New York run also returned to the pages of the California-based issues including contributors Sergio Aragonés, Al Jaffee, Desmond Devlin, Tom Richmond, Peter Kuper, Teresa Burns Parkhurst, Rick Tulka, Tom Bunk, Jeff Kruse, Ed Steckley, Arie Kaplan, writer and former Senior Editor Charlie Kadau, and artist and former Art Director Sam Viviano. The first California issue of Mad was renumbered as "#1." In 2019, the rebooted magazine earned two Eisner Award nominations—the first such nominations in Mad's history—for the Best Short Story and Best Humor Publication categories.

AT&T acquired Time Warner in June 2018. Morrison exited Mad by March 2019, during a time of layoffs and restructuring at DC Entertainment. After issue No. 11 (Feb. 2020) of the new Burbank edition, Mad began to consist mostly of curated reprints with new covers and fold-ins, although some new articles have been periodically featured, including parodies of The Batman ("The Bathroom") and Elon Musk's tenure at Twitter (in a Dr. Seuss parody called "Free Speeches on the Beaches"). Distribution to newsstands stopped, with the magazine initially becoming available only through comic-book shops and by subscription, although in 2022 distribution expanded to Barnes & Noble via a series of compilation issues dubbed The Treasure Trove of Trash.

Influence

Though there are antecedents to Mads style of humor in print, radio and film, Mad itself became a signature example. Throughout the 1950s, Mad featured groundbreaking parodies combining a sentimental fondness for the familiar staples of American culture—such as Archie and Superman—with a keen joy in exposing the fakery behind the image. Its approach was described by Dave Kehr in The New York Times: "Bob Elliott and Ray Goulding on the radio, Ernie Kovacs on television, Stan Freberg on records, Harvey Kurtzman in the early issues of Mad: all of those pioneering humorists and many others realized that the real world mattered less to people than the sea of sounds and images that the ever more powerful mass media were pumping into American lives." Bob and Ray, Kovacs and Freberg all became contributors to Mad.

In 1977, Tony Hiss and Jeff Lewis wrote in The New York Times about the then-25-year-old publication's initial effect:

Mad is often credited with filling a vital gap in political satire from the 1950s to 1970s, when Cold War paranoia and a general culture of censorship prevailed in the United States, especially in literature for teens. Activist Tom Hayden said, "My own radical journey began with Mad Magazine." The rise of such factors as cable television and the Internet has diminished the influence and impact of Mad, although it remains a widely distributed magazine. In a way, Mads power has been undone by its own success: what was subversive in the 1950s and 1960s is now commonplace. However, its impact on three generations of humorists is incalculable, as can be seen in the frequent references to Mad on the animated series The Simpsons. The Simpsons producer Bill Oakley said, "The Simpsons has transplanted Mad magazine. Basically everyone who was young between 1955 and 1975 read Mad, and that's where your sense of humor came from. And we knew all these people, you know, Dave Berg and Don Martin—all heroes, and unfortunately, now all dead." In 2009, The New York Times wrote, "Mad once defined American satire; now it heckles from the margins as all of culture competes for trickster status." Longtime contributor Al Jaffee described the dilemma to an interviewer in 2010: "When Mad first came out, in 1952, it was the only game in town. Now, you've got graduates from Mad who are doing The Today Show or Stephen Colbert or Saturday Night Live. All of these people grew up on Mad. Now Mad has to top them. So Mad is almost in a competition with itself."

Mads satiric net was cast wide. The magazine often featured parodies of ongoing American culture, including advertising campaigns, the nuclear family, the media, big business, education and publishing. In the 1960s and beyond, it satirized such burgeoning topics as the sexual revolution, hippies, the generation gap, psychoanalysis, gun politics, pollution, the Vietnam War and recreational drug use. The magazine took a generally negative tone towards counterculture drugs such as cannabis and LSD, but it also savaged mainstream drugs such as tobacco and alcohol. Mad always satirized Democrats as mercilessly as it did Republicans. In 2007, Al Feldstein recalled, "We even used to rake the hippies over the coals. They were protesting the Vietnam War, but we took aspects of their culture and had fun with it. Mad was wide open. Bill loved it, and he was a capitalist Republican. I loved it, and I was a liberal Democrat. That went for the writers, too; they all had their own political leanings, and everybody had a voice. But the voices were mostly critical. It was social commentary, after all." Mad also ran a good deal of less topical or contentious material on such varied subjects as fairy tales, nursery rhymes, greeting cards, sports, small talk, poetry, marriage, comic strips, awards shows, cars and many other areas of general interest.

thumb|left|Actor [[Michael Biehn (pictured in 2012) autographing a copy of Mad No. 268 (Jan. 1987), which parodies Biehn's film Aliens]]

In 1988, Geoffrey O'Brien wrote about the impact Mad had upon the younger generation of the 1950s:

In 1994, Brian Siano in The Humanist discussed the effect of Mad on that segment of people already disaffected from society:

Pulitzer Prize-winning art comics maven Art Spiegelman said, "The message Mad had in general is, 'The media is lying to you, and we are part of the media.' It was basically ... 'Think for yourselves, kids. William Gaines offered his own view: when asked to cite Mads philosophy, his boisterous answer was, "We must never stop reminding the reader what little value they get for their money!"

Comics historian Tom Spurgeon picked Mad as the medium's top series of all time, writing, "At the height of its influence, Mad was The Simpsons, The Daily Show and The Onion combined." Graydon Carter chose it as the sixth-best magazine of any sort ever, describing Mads mission as being "ever ready to pounce on the illogical, hypocritical, self-serious and ludicrous" before concluding, "Nowadays, it's part of the oxygen we breathe." Joyce Carol Oates called it "wonderfully inventive, irresistibly irreverent and intermittently ingenious".

Artist Dave Gibbons said, "When you think of the people who grew up in the '50s and '60s, the letters M-A-D were probably as influential as L-S-D, in that it kind of expanded people's consciousness and showed them an alternative view of society and consumer culture—mocked it, satirized it." Gibbons also noted that Mad was an overt influence on Watchmen, the acclaimed 12-issue comic book series created by writer Alan Moore and himself:

In a 1985 Tonight Show appearance, when Johnny Carson asked Michael J. Fox, "When did you really know you'd made it in show business?", Fox replied, "When Mort Drucker drew my head." In 2019, Terence Winter, writer and producer of The Sopranos, told Variety "When we got into Mad Magazine, that was the highlight for me. That said everything."

Monty Python's Terry Gilliam wrote, "Mad became the Bible for me and my whole generation." Underground cartoonist Bill Griffith said of his youth, "Mad was a life raft in a place like Levittown, where all around you were the things that Mad was skewering and making fun of."

Robert Crumb remarked, "Artists are always trying to equal the work that impressed them in their childhood and youth. I still feel extremely inadequate when I look at the old Mad comics."

When Weird Al Yankovic was asked whether Mad had had any influence in putting him on a road to a career in parody, the musician replied, "[It was] more like going off a cliff." Mystery Science Theater 3000 writer-actor Frank Conniff wrote, "Without Mad Magazine, MST3K would have been slightly different, like for instance, it wouldn't have existed." Comedian Jerry Seinfeld talked about the magazine's impact on him, saying, "You start reading it, and you're going, 'These people don't respect anything.' And that just exploded my head. It was like, you don't have to buy it. You can say 'This is stupid. This is stupid.

Critic Roger Ebert wrote:

Rock singer Patti Smith said more succinctly, "After Mad, drugs were nothing."

Recurring features

Mad is known for many regular and semi-regular recurring features in its pages, including "Spy vs. Spy", the "Mad Fold-in", "The Lighter Side of ..." and its television and movie parodies. The magazine has also included recurring gags and references, both visual (e.g. the Mad Zeppelin, or Arthur the potted plant) and linguistic (unusual words such as axolotl, furshlugginer, potrzebie and veeblefetzer).

Alfred E. Neuman

right|324px|thumb|First cover appearance (issue 21, March 1955) of Alfred E. Neuman in a fake advertisement satirizing the popular mail-order house [[Johnson Smith Company]]

The image most closely associated with the magazine is that of Alfred E. Neuman, the boy with misaligned eyes, a gap-toothed smile, and the perennial motto "What, me worry?" The original image was a popular humorous graphic for many decades before Mad adopted it, but the face is now primarily associated with Mad.

Mad initially used the boy's face in November 1954. His first iconic full-cover appearance was as a write-in candidate for president on issue No. 30 (December 1956), in which he was identified by name and sported his "What, me worry?" motto. He has since appeared in a slew of guises and comic situations. According to Mad writer Frank Jacobs, a letter was once successfully delivered to the magazine through the U.S. mail bearing only Neuman's face, without any address or other identifying information. The publishers again appealed, but the Supreme Court refused to hear it, allowing the decision to stand.

This precedent-setting 1964 ruling established the rights of parodists and satirists to mimic the meter of popular songs. However, the "Sing Along With Mad" songbook was not the magazine's first venture into musical parody. In 1960, Mad had published "My Fair Ad-Man", a full advertising-based spoof of the hit Broadway musical My Fair Lady. In 1959, "If Gilbert & Sullivan wrote Dick Tracy" was one of the speculative pairings in "If Famous Authors Wrote the Comics".

In 1966, a series of copyright infringement lawsuits against the magazine regarding ownership of the Alfred E. Neuman image eventually reached the appellate level. Although Harry Stuff had copyrighted the image in 1914, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit ruled that, by allowing many copies of the image to circulate without any copyright notice, the owner of the copyright had allowed the image to pass into the public domain, thus establishing the right of Mad—or anyone else—to use the image. In addition, Mad established that Stuff was not himself the creator of the image, by producing numerous other examples dating back to the late 19th century. This decision was also allowed to stand.

Other legal disputes were settled more easily. Following the magazine's parody of the film The Empire Strikes Back, a letter from George Lucas's lawyers arrived in Mads offices demanding that the issue be recalled for infringement on copyrighted figures. The letter further demanded that the printing plates be destroyed, and that Lucasfilm must receive all revenue from the issue plus additional punitive damages. Unbeknownst to Lucas' lawyers, Mad had received a letter weeks earlier from Lucas himself, expressing delight over the parody and calling artist Mort Drucker and writer Dick DeBartolo "the Leonardo da Vinci and George Bernard Shaw of comic satire." Publisher Bill Gaines made a copy of Lucas' letter, added the handwritten notation "Gee, your boss George liked it!" across the top, and mailed it to the lawyers. Said DeBartolo, "We never heard from them again."

Mad was one of several parties that filed amicus curiae briefs with the Supreme Court in support of 2 Live Crew and its disputed song parody, during the 1993 Campbell v. Acuff-Rose Music, Inc. case.

Advertising

Mad was long noted for its absence of advertising, enabling it to satirize materialist culture without fear of reprisal. For decades, it was the most successful American magazine to publish ad-free, beginning with issue No. 33 (June 1957) and continuing through issue No. 404 (April 2001).

As a comic book, Mad had run the same advertisements as the rest of EC's line. The magazine later made a deal with Moxie soda that involved inserting the Moxie logo into various articles. Mad ran a limited number of ads in its first two years as a magazine, helpfully labeled "real advertisement" to differentiate the real from the parodies. The last authentic ad published under the original Mad regime was for Famous Artists School; two issues later, the inside front cover of issue No. 34 had a parody of the same ad. After this transitional period, the only promotions to appear in Mad for decades were house ads for Mads own books and specials, subscriptions, and promotional items such as ceramic busts, T-shirts, or a line of Mad jewelry. This rule was bent only a few times to promote outside products directly related to the magazine, such as The Mad Magazine Game, a series of video games based on Spy vs. Spy, and the notorious Up the Academy movie (which the magazine later disowned). Mad explicitly promised that it would never make its mailing list available.

Both Kurtzman and Feldstein wanted the magazine to solicit advertising, feeling this could be accomplished without compromising Mads content or editorial independence. Kurtzman remembered Ballyhoo, a boisterous 1930s humor publication that made an editorial point of mocking its own sponsors. Feldstein went so far as to propose an in-house Mad ad agency, and produced a "dummy" copy of what an issue with ads could look like. But Bill Gaines was intractable, telling the television news magazine 60 Minutes, "We long ago decided we couldn't take money from Pepsi-Cola and make fun of Coca-Cola." Gaines' motivation in eschewing ad dollars was less philosophical than practical: