★★★☆☆ Slouching towards New York

MAD About the 50's

The Usual Gang of Idiots

Slouching towards New York

And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards New York to be born?

MAD magazine was founded in 1952 by Harvey Kurtzman as a comic book. Kurtzman had experience in comics, being the author of several deeply researched military history comics. But these took so much work to produce that he needed something else to keep the wolf from the door, and thus was born MAD. (It only became a magazine a few years later when the heavy regulation of comic books forced a reclassification.) By all accounts Kurtzman was an extraordinarily creative writer and artist, and it was his vision that gave MAD its unique nature. Kurtzman, however, was not a businessman or even the kind of author who can be relied on to hit deadlines, so that was a problem. In 1954 he (and all but one of the artists he had recruited to draw MAD) were lured by Hugh Hefner to a new comic book venture, called Trump (yes, really). This shattered on the rocks of Hefner’s addiction to micromanagement and Kurtzman’s lack of tolerance for that.

In the meantime MAD’s publisher, William Gaines, managed to find a new editor, and MAD Magazine survived.

Thus, what we have here in Mad About the Fifties is MAD’s Salad Days. It resembles, I am sorry to say, a rough draft of the glory that would eventually be MAD magazine. There is no denying that much of MAD’s output in the fifties was just lame. I found myself averting my eyes and quickly swiping through some of the offerings. There are occasional flashes of glory — I particularly loved “The MAD Primer”.

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