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Long Live the

by Grant Geissman
-NESS

y 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-
Blife war comics, Two-Fisted Tales and Frontline Combat. For these, Kurtzman
would do meticulous and time-consuming research, including talking to war veterans,
reading historical accounts, and even going up on a test flight. The final product was
stunning, if only moderately successful.
Truth was, in spite of all his hard work Kurtzman simply wasn’t making enough to
support his family. He appealed to EC Comics publisher Bill Gaines for a raise, but
payments were calculated by the number of books an editor could turn out, not by the
time it took to do one. Gaines proposed a solution: If Harvey could sandwich in another
book between the ones he was already doing (a book that could be done quickly, without
all the heavy research), his income would go up by 50 percent. What kind of book might
that be? Kurtzman was good with humor, so why not try that? Thus, out of a simple (yet
pressing) need for more income, MAD, a publication destined to become an American
institution, was born.

THE BEGINNING
The first issue of MAD, a 10¢ comic book, was cover-dated Oct.-Nov., 1952, and
appeared on the nation’s newsstands in August. The initial concept was to satirize the
kinds of comic books that
EC had been turning out:
horror, science fiction,
crime, and even EC’s
very short-lived romance
comics. The artists selected
for MAD were the same
core group of artists who
had been working on
Kurtzman’s war books:
Bill Elder, John Severin,
Jack Davis, and Wallace
Wood. The stories, while
comedic, were nonetheless
aimed at an older, more
The Harvey Kurtzman-illustrated cover of the sophisticated reader than
1952 first issue of MAD, then a 10¢ comic book.
was the average “funny
book.” The first few issues

The first bonafide classic to appear in MAD, “Superduperman!”
(written by Harvey Kurtzman and illustrated by Wallace Wood, MAD No. 4, April–May 1953)
The owners of Superman were not amused by this parody and threatened legal action.
To cool things down, MAD publisher Bill Gaines had to promise not to do it again,
a promise he ended up breaking over and over again with various
parodies of characters owned by DC Comics.