The first twenty-three issues of MAD Magazine weren't a magazine. It was a comic book and I don't know that anyone even referred to it as MAD Magazine then. But that comic book's editor-writer Harvey Kurtzman did brilliant and funny things in it, aided by a sensational squadron of artists.
Here's something I find kinda interesting. Maybe you will too…
According to all accounts, MAD was started because Kurtzman — a slow-and-steady writer-editor and sometimes-artist — felt he wasn't making enough money. He was writing, editing and sometimes drawing his two scrupulously-researched, adventure-type historical comics that William M. Gaines was publishing as part of the E.C. line of comics. Gaines and Kurtzman later disagreed as to which of them decided MAD was started because it seemed like something Kurtzman could produce more swiftly than the heavily-researched comics, nor did they agree on which of them named it MAD. But there was no dispute it was started as a way to perhaps increase Kurtzman's income.
Here's the part I find kinda interesting. Kurtzman's great squad of artists on those war/adventure comics consisted mainly of Will Elder, Jack Davis, Wally Wood and John Severin. And then he did the new humor comic with another great squad of artists — Will Elder, Jack Davis, Wally Wood and John Severin. He used the same guys and if he'd scoured the entire industry and had his pick of anyone then in it, he probably couldn't have done any better than Will Elder, Jack Davis, Wally Wood and John Severin.
MAD didn't catch on right away. If it had been a DC Comic in the late-sixties or most of the seventies, it would have been declared a flop and canceled as soon as they saw the sales figures of the second issue…maybe even the first. But Gaines kept it going and before long, it was not only the best-selling comic in his line, it was the one publication he had that survived the horror/crime comic purges of the fifties. It kept him publishing, made him a very wealthy man and spawned countless imitations.
A lot of people think that MAD went from being a ten-cent comic book to a twenty-five-cent (at first) magazine to escape the comic book censorship and the Comics Code. Nope. It changed formats because Kurtzman was embarrassed to be working in the comic book industry. Comics were printed via the cheapest printing possible on the cheapest paper available. Most of the rest of Gaines' line consisted of titles like Tales From the Crypt which many people regarded as a kind of pornography…and Kurtzman didn't disagree that much. He wanted to be in a more respectable kind of publishing.
When he received an offer to work for Pageant Magazine — then, a more respectable kind of publishing — he told Gaines he wanted to leave. Gaines panicked. Most of his comic book line was teetering on extinction. Only MAD looked like it might have a healthy future and Gaines was convinced that only Kurtzman could make the magazine work. He told his restless writer-editor something like, "Harvey, you always said you wished MAD was a slick magazine instead of a comic book. If you stay, I'll turn MAD into a slick magazine." Kurtzman agreed to stay. It kept MAD on the newsstands when many distributors were refusing to carry Gaines' comic book line but that's not the reason MAD became a slick; just a happy side effect.
The first week of May, 1955, the first issue of the twenty-five-cent MAD hit newsstands. It was #24, it was a sensation and it only got more sensational after that but Kurtzman didn't stick around. Hugh Hefner — then flush with cash due to the early success of Playboy — made Kurtzman one of those offers you can't refuse. He couldn't, anyway. As of #29, Al Feldstein was the editor of MAD — a job he did for the next 29 years as MAD became a top-selling American institution.
And believe it or not, I wrote all of the above just to lead into a discussion of MAD's famous cover logo. Kurtzman designed it and it first appeared on the first magazine issue. It looked like this…
Harvey did the drawings of the little nymphs frolicking around in the logo but was not happy with how it came out. Harvey was rarely happy with how anything he did came out. One of the causes of friction between Gaines and Kurtzman was that Harvey was the kind of creator who did something, then he did it over and he did it over and he did it over and then he did it over and might have preferred to never send the thing to press; to just spend all eternity trying to improve it another billionth of a percent. Wally Wood, who did finished art over a lot of Kurtzman layouts, told me that Harvey would get it as good as it was going to get on the third or fourth try, then do it ten more times of declining merit, before handing it off.
That mix of perfectionism and fear was the reason that under Kurtzman, the magazine version of MAD, though officially a bi-monthly, kept coming out late. There were three months between his second and third issues, four between his third issue and his fourth issue, etc. At some point in there, Kurtzman even took the time to redo the logo. He redid it for #27. Here's a before-and-after and if you click on it, you can enlarge it…
I once asked John Putnam, who was MAD's first art director, if someone else did the outline of the letters and then Kurtzman drew in his charming little creatures. He said yes but he didn't remember who the calligraphy person was, other than that it wasn't someone who did much (if any) other work for the magazine. I didn't know enough at the time to ask if he was thinking of whoever did the outlines for the first version, the second version or both. Kurtzman was not known for this lettering designs so I suspected both. Then I asked Feldstein and he wasn't 100% sure but he was semi-certain it was John Putnam. So that's as far as I got with that mystery.
The fine folks at Heritage Auctions are about to auction off the original artwork to the second logo — the one that became pretty much official — and a lot of online folks are unaware there were two versions of that logo. There were, of course, lots of variations of it on MAD and MAD products over the years. Kurtzman's nymphs took the covers of #55, #67, #78 off, were parodied on the cover of #76, and then disappeared after #86 only to reappear on #93, #95 and very rarely after that. Sergio Aragonés, Al Jaffee, Don Martin and Antonio Prohias all took turns replacing Kurtzman's creatures with their own.
I read MAD for years before I paid any attention to what Harvey Kurtzman had doodled in the original official logo. Once I became aware of those nymphs (or whatever they were), I wondered what they were, who they were, what the hell they had to do with MAD, etc. The few times I got to talk with Harvey, I wish I'd asked him…but I knew him well enough to believe he had something on his mind. I only wish I knew what.