This year, MAD magazine and I both celebrate our 70th anniversaries. I was born on March 2, 1952 and the first issue of MAD, which was then a ten-cent comic book, reached newsstands on July 10, 1952…and on 3/2/52, a brilliant gent named Harvey Kurtzman was probably writing that first issue. I'm technically a few months older and, I'd like to think, a few months wiser.
MAD was a newsprint four-color comic book for its first 23 issues, edited and mostly written by Kurtzman. The first few issues didn't sell all that well because, one suspects, there'd never been anything quite like it on those newsstands and the kind of people who might like such a publication weren't yet looking there for one. Also, though it was a parody comic, it took a few issues before they figured out just what they should be parodying. The comic took off when Kurtzman realized it should be movies, TV shows and (especially) other comic books. Sales began to rise and the publication started being noticed in higher-brow publishing circles.
But it was still a comic book and Kurtzman was embarrassed by the comic book industry. In 1952, there was a lot there to be embarrassed by and he was even uncomfy with other comic books from the publisher who published MAD, filled as they were with horror and violence. He may have even been more down on the package. Comics were a dime and they were printed on the cheapest-possible paper.
He wanted to be part of a "real magazine" printed on better paper. William M. Gaines, the publisher of MAD (and all those comics filled with horror and violence) believed MAD could not survive without Kurtzman so when Harvey got an offer to go work for what seemed to him like a "real magazine," Gaines agreed to make MAD into a magazine printed on better paper.
The first magazine issue of MAD, #24, came out in May of 1955. Kurtzman left it a few issues later for what he thought (wrongly) was a better opportunity but MAD kept on a-going, becoming bigger and better and more influential. A man named Al Feldstein took over as editor and assembled a team of some of the best cartoonists and comedy writers ever…and sales just went up and up and up.
The magazine has declined in the last decades — as have just about all magazines — but it's still going. It's been almost all reprint for a while now but its 70th Anniversary Issue (featuring more new material than usual) is due out any day now.
I remember exactly where I purchased my first issue of MAD. It was issue #70 and I bought it in early February of 1962 at the long-gone Westward Ho market on Westwood Boulevard in West Los Angeles. The cover depicted Alfred E. Neuman ice-skating, happily leaping over a number of barrels and blissfully unaware he was about to collide with another skater leaping over those barrels from the opposite direction. I did not realize at the time how now important this magazine would be to my life.
Well, maybe in a teensy way, I did. But I didn't dream that, for example, I would get to know most of the people who worked for it in its glory days — one of them is my best friend — and write a book about it and an article or two for it. More important to my life has been that it's one of the reasons I became a writer of comedy.
That issue #70 started it. I immediately began hitting second-hand bookstores around Los Angeles searching for back issues. I think I said here once that my mission was so successful that by the time #71 hit the newsstands, I had a complete collection. That, I later realized, wasn't quite true. By the time that next issue came out, I owned copies of #28 and #30-69. Soon after, I found #24-27 and #29. It took longer to get my hands on the first 23 issues because I didn't know they were comic books…and even if I had, they were difficult to locate. I have not missed an issue since.
Also before #71, I found and purchased copies of all twelve MAD paperbacks that had been issued: The MAD Reader, MAD Strikes Back, Inside MAD, Utterly MAD, the Brothers MAD, The Bedside MAD, Son of MAD, The Organization MAD, Like MAD, The Ides of MAD, Fighting MAD and The MAD Frontier. They all contained reprints of material from the magazine but the next one to come out — Don Martin Steps Out — was the first to feature all-new material and it was very wonderful. So were a lot of subsequent MAD paperbacks by Mr. Martin and other MAD contributors. I don't think the original MAD paperbacks have gotten the attention they deserve, nor are any of them in print now.
I'd better wrap this up soon because I could write about MAD so long and so much that it would make my recent Blackhawk series look like a Tweet. I could write about its glories and I could write about the occasional periods when, as is inevitable over seventy years, it didn't meet its own standards. I just wanted to remind you that it's still being published and tell you that I just got my copy of that new celebratory issue in the mail and that its best years deserve way more attention and respect than they've received. Even if the magazine was produced by The Usual Gang of Idiots.