#popculture55: EC Comics’ “Mad” Becomes a Magazine

The sophisticated humor comic from the most diverse comics publisher of the 50s took off when they catered to the magazine industry.

by Rich Watson 

I didn’t buy Mad Magazine as often as I did regular comic books, but when I read it, I thought it was hilarious, of course. The fold-in pictures on the back cover (a second image made from the first by folding it in on itself) struck me as clever and inventive and I always wondered how they did it.

Mad was created during a time when comics were under great public scrutiny. They adopted a magazine format in 1955.

They never looked back.

50s comic books and juvenile delinquency 

During the fifties, teenagers acting up drove people crazy. There were scapegoats a-plenty: television, rhythm-and-blues music (about to become rock and roll), racism, drugs, gangs, the list goes on. 

President Eisenhower wanted Congress to give states federal aid to fund programs that fought “juvenile delinquency.” Movies like Blackboard Jungle and Rebel Without a Cause addressed the fear of JDs running wild in the suburbs.

Another perceived threat was comic books. In the forties, people publicly burned them. The 1954 book Seduction of the Innocent by Dr. Frederic Wertham connected the dots of subliminal depictions of sex and violence in comics to actual behavior from JDs. (Subsequent deep dives into his research have disproven his findings.) 

People at the time bought his rhetoric. The Senate authorized a Special Subcommittee on Juvenile Delinquency, also in 1954. One of the topics was comic books. Wertham was called to testify.

After a brief hiatus during high school, I picked up comics again, during the early nineties. Later in the decade, when I started publishing my own, I learned about this period, around the time contemporary attempts to ban comics for perceived obscenity occurred, in places like Florida. I addressed this when I wrote an online comics column in the 2000s.

Amidst the fifties maelstrom, there was Harvey Kurtzman and his comic book Mad.

Harvey Kurtzman and Mad

An attendee of the New York art school Cooper Union (as well as a big fan of comic strips, such as Will Eisner’s The Spirit), Kurtzman joined publisher EC Comics in 1950 as a writer and editor. Founded by Max Gaines in 1944 and succeeded by his son William, EC published a variety of genre material including, but not limited to, horror, crime, sci-fi and war. 

In 1952, Kurtzman started a humor comic called Mad. He wrote and laid out each story for his artists to follow. Characterized by jokes, satire, and irreverence, for an older, more sophisticated audience than just kids, its artists included some of comics’ greatest names, including Wally Wood, Jack Davis and Will Elder.

According to the book The Ten-Cent Plague by David Hadju, the kind of humor Mad specialized in was unique at the time:

There had always been comical comics, of course… [y]et, in comics publishing, humor had been relegated almost exclusively to juvenilia. Few people in comics made much effort to tailor comedy to the young adults who read things such as The Spirit, St. John’s romance comics, or EC’s line. Indeed, prideful comics artists and writers tended to resist humor for fear that it would make their work seem even more lightweight than it was already taken to be. “The average person thought of comic books as joke books,” said Will Eisner. “…What Harvey did was very brave, because he chose to produce a whole book full of humor for the older reader. I wouldn’t have known how to do that.”

The subcommittee hearings and the Comics Code

EC’s success put them in the sights of the Juvenile Delinquency Subcommittee. 

William Gaines also testified. He was forced to defend his product, which seemed indefensible to the Subcommittee, and indeed, to the average person at the time:

Senator Estes Kefauver: Here is your May 22 issue [of Crime SuspenStories]. This seems to be a man with a bloody ax holding a woman’s head up which has been severed from her body. Do you think that is in good taste?

Gaines: Yes sir; I do, for the cover of a horror comic. A cover in bad taste, for example, might be defined as holding the head a little higher so that the neck could be seen dripping blood from it and moving the body over a little further so that the neck of the body could be seen to be bloody.

Senator Kefauver: You have blood coming out of her mouth.

Gaines: A little.

Here’s more about the 1954 hearings.

By August, the comics industry, fearing government regulation, instituted the Comics Code Authority, a set of guidelines under which they would abide, that curtailed what they could depict, similar to Hollywood’s Hays Code.

It was the beginning of the end for EC.

Mad’s format switch and EC Comics’ decline 

Mad had sales as high as 750,000 in 1954, but Kurtzman had larger ambitions for his book. He aspired to be in the more lucrative, more prestigious magazine industry.

According to Gaines in a 1983 interview, he had to be talked into a format switch:

Harvey had come to me and said, “How would you like to turn Mad into a slick magazine?” And I said I wouldn’t like to turn Mad into a slick magazine, I’m a comic publisher, I don’t know anything about slick magazines, it’s a whole different ballgame and I’m not interested… and that was the end of it for six, eight, 10 months, until he was offered this job with Pageant… [a]nd I said, “Harvey, if you stay, I’ll let you make Mad a slick.”

Kurtzman found a higher-quality printer. He switched to typeset lettering instead of hand-lettering. He abandoned color.

In July 1955, Mad relaunched as a magazine with issue twenty-four, priced at twenty-five cents.

The rest of EC Comics, however, had begun feeling the effects of the CCA. Gaines deemphasized the horror and crime comics in favor of more realistic titles, with the CCA seal on the covers. 

They became financial flops. By 1956 Gaines dropped all his titles except Mad. Kurtzman left the book. In 1961 Gaines sold the company, though the classic titles live on in reprints. The CCA was rendered defunct by 2011.

Last year, Oni Press revived the EC brand.

As for Mad, the company now known as DC Comics took over publication beginning in 1964. Mad’s final issue was in 2018. It has been exclusively online since. It remains revered as an irreverent, subversive humor magazine that inspired generations of young people. 

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Also in 1955:

• Marvel Comics predecessor Atlas debuts the Rawhide Kid.
• Original Justice Leaguer Martian Manhunter debuts.
• Newspaper strip Dondi debuts.
• Rocketeer creator Dave Stevens is born.
• Dragon Ball creator Akira Toriyama is born.

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Did you read Mad Magazine? Leave a comment and let me know!

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