February 2021

Long Live The MAD-ness

The cover to MAD No. 50 (October 1959), illustrated by Kelly Freas. While Mingo could produce endless identical versions of the Alfred E. Neuman face, Freas’s Alfreds were more impish and had much more expression.

by Grant Geissman By the spring of 1952, artist/writer/editor Harvey Kurtzman was exhausted from researching, writing, laying out, drawing for, and editing the world’s first true-to-life war comics, Two-Fisted Tales and Frontline Combat. For these, Kurtzman would do meticulous and…