Posted on: Tuesday, April 2, 2002

MAD celebrates half century

By Bob Minzesheimer
USA Today

Offering "tales calculated to drive you MAD," it began as a 10-cent comic book 50 years ago this fall, when comic books were widely denounced for contributing to "juvenile delinquency."

In 1955, MAD transformed itself into a magazine to avoid the sanitized Comics Code Authority, which publishers formed under pressure from Congress.

Ever since, MAD, edited by "the usual gang of idiots," has been displaying a smart-aleck disdain for just about everything. Its gap-toothed symbol, Alfred E. Neuman, the "What — Me Worry?" idiot boy, made his cover debut in 1956.

The current issue ("$2.99 cheap!") features a spread on "New Children's Titles to Cash in on the Taliban-Related Book Craze," including "Are You There Allah? It's Me, Osama" and "If You Give a Mullah a Fatwa."

Last month came facsimile reprints of two paperbacks, "The MAD Reader" and "MAD Strikes Back!" (ibooks, $9.99 each), that have been out of print for 25 years but claim a place in publishing (and perhaps cultural) history.

In 1954, "The MAD Reader" became the first paperback collection from a comic book. In "Two-Bit Culture: The Paperbacking of America," Kenneth Davis writes that it was "enormously popular" and that MAD humor was, if not subversive, at least non-conformist. Parents found it sick, but it appealed to kids unlike anything appearing in mainstream comics. It was irreverent, anti-authoritarian and iconoclastic. It spoke to a young generation that would, in a few years, be taking over the campuses."

Publisher William Gaines and editor Harvey Kurtzman began MAD lampooning other comic books, including their own horror and crime comics.

They soon targeted other forms of popular culture and politics.

"The MAD Reader" parodies Superman as "Superduperman," Archie as "Starchie" and the Lone Ranger as "Lone Stranger." One feature mocks Sen. Joseph McCarthy as an evil-looking Joe McCartaway and the Army-McCarthy Senate hearings as a crazed quiz show.

The magazine's circulation is 250,000, down from a high of 2.8 million in 1973. It boasts that 44 percent of its readers are between 11 and 15, that 80 percent are male, and that it's a "rite of passage for teen boys ... just like acne and getting rejected by girls!"