Jordan Orlando of The New Yorker writes the latest in a series of farewell tributes to MAD. I have two things to say about this, one being my ongoing prediction that MAD will be back sooner than might be expected.
The other point is a minor one and I've noted it before here a number of times. MAD started life as one of the comic books published by Bill Gaines' company, which was known as E.C.. Orlando writes about how the Comics Code, a publisher-organized self-censorship authority, came into being and says "No E.C. titles survived the purge except MAD, which escaped the Comics Code by expanding its trim size to become a "magazine" — and this new, adaptable hybrid format was the key to its longevity.
That's a totally logical deduction based on the timing but, to quote one of several earlier posts here on the matter…
[MAD editor-creator Harvey] Kurtzman was generally embarrassed that he worked in comic books. He loved the form but he hated the cheapness of the product and the bad image that dime comic books were getting.
One day, Harvey received an offer to go work at Pageant, a slick magazine of the day. Harvey longed to get out of comics and into the slicks and had, for some time, urged Gaines to turn MAD into a slick. For a long time, Gaines resisted the suggestion but when Kurtzman said he was leaving to go work at Pageant, Gaines relented. He was certain that MAD could not survive the loss of Kurtzman so he made the change not to avoid censorship — though that was a happy bonus — but to keep his indispensable editor on board.
Gaines actually did join the Comics Code and he submitted all his comics — including Panic, his own imitation of MAD — to it for over a year before plunging sales killed his comic book line. MAD would probably have died with the other books had not his desire to appease Kurtzman pushed it into a different format.
Alfred E. Neuman, by the way, is not dead. He's been seen on the streets of Burbank near the DC Comics offices, holding a cardboard sign that says "Will worry for food!"