MAD Magazine

Mad is an American humor magazine founded by publisher William Gaines and editor Harvey Kurtzman in 1952. Offering satires on all aspects of American pop culture, the monthly publication deflates stuffed shirts and pokes fun at common foibles. It is the last surviving title from the notorious and critically acclaimed EC Comics line. Publisher Gaines had suffered greatly from censorship, which had literally driven his prior line of EC horror comics from the stands.

Imitators and variants

Mad has had many imitators through the years. The three most durable of these were CRACKED, Sick, and Crazy. Most others were short-lived exercises, such as Zany (4 issues), Frantic (2 issues), Ratfink (1 issue), Nuts! (2 issues), Get Lost (3 issues), Whack (3 issues), Wild (5 issues), Madhouse (8 issues), Riot (6 issues), Flip (2 issues), Eh! (7 issues), and Gag! (1 issue). Even EC Comics joined the parade with a sister humor magazine, Panic, produced by future Mad editor Al Feldstein. Most of these productions aped the format of Mad right down to choosing a synonym for the word mad as their title. Many featured a cover mascot along the lines of MAD's Alfred E. Neuman.

Related Topics:
CRACKED - Sick - Crazy - EC Comics - Alfred E. Neuman

~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~

In 1967, Marvel Comics produced the first of 13 issues of Not Brand Echh, which parodied their own superhero titles, and owed its entire inspiration and format to the original "Mad" comic books of a decade earlier. From 1973-1976, DC Comics published Plop! which was much the same but relied more on one-page gags and horror-based comedy.

Related Topics:
1967 - Marvel Comics - Not Brand Echh - DC Comics - Plop!

~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~

But as it carries on past its 50th year, Mad has outlasted them all, save Cracked, which has appeared infrequently for years but still bobs in and out of production.

~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~

Other humor magazines of note include former Mad editor Harvey Kurtzman's Humbug, Trump and Help!, the National Lampoon, and Spy Magazine, but these cannot be considered direct ripoffs of Mad in the same way as the others mentioned here. Of all the competition, only the National Lampoon ever threatened MAD's hegemony as America's top humor magazine, in the early-to-mid-1970s. However, this was also the period of MAD's greatest sales figures. Both magazines peaked in sales about the same time. The Lampoon topped one million sales once, for a single issue in 1974. Mad crossed the two-million mark with an average 1973 circulation of 2,059,236, then improved to 2,132,655 in 1974.

Related Topics:
Humbug - Trump - Help! - National Lampoon - Spy Magazine

~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~

Gaines reportedly kept a voodoo doll in his business office, into which he would stick pins labelled with each imitation of his magazine. He would only remove a pin when the copycat had ceased publishing. At the time of Gaines' death in 1992, only the pin for Cracked remained.

~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~