What flourished in that strange climate was a magazine that validated many a kid’s innermost feelings about mass culture and Madison Avenue. “I couldn’t believe it,” Rick Meyerowitz, who grew up to become a prominent commercial artist, once said. “Somebody was putting down on paper all these things that were in my mind.” Mad was created in 1952 by Harvey Kurtzman, an artist/writer then working on “Two-Fisted Tales” and “Front-Line Combat” for a firm founded by Gaines’s father. Originally titled “Tales Calculated to Drive You MAD: Humor in a Jugular Vein,” the magazine was, at first, mostly a spoof of the day’s dumber comics. Instead of Superman, Mad gave you Superduperman, a hero whose alter ego, Clark Bent, had flies buzzing around his head and who couldn’t get to first base with Lois Pain. Instead of Prince Valiant, you got Prince Violent–and all for, as it said on the cover, “Our Price 25 cents Cheap.” Parents called it pure trash, but the Usual Gang of Idiots (as the Mad crew was known) took Alfred E. Newman’s What, Me Worry? attitude. After all, they were promoting the magazine as pure trash.
It wasn’t, though. Mad once reached as many as 2.4 million buyers, one of whom was R. Crumb, the future Cezanne of sleaze. And Kurtzman left in 1956 to create, among other things, “Little Annie Fanny” for Playboy. But with Gaines at the helm, in his fashion, Mad never got scatological or terribly concerned with sex. It just lurched along on its strange eight-times-a-year schedule (the January issue comes out in November), taking neither prisoners nor advertising, poking fun at movies and television and running regular features like Antonio Prohias’s “Spy vs. Spy.” Sales peaked in the ’70s, then declined as baby boomers outgrew the magazine. In 1968 Kinney, which became Warner Communications, acquired Mad, but Gaines never stopped going to the office (“I plan to die here,” he said recently) or being legendarily cheap. He once interrupted an editorial meeting and demanded to know whether a call to Reading, Pa., had been business or personal. Every year or two, though, he’d take his employees on a trip. The last was a cruise to Bermuda, during which he and his entourage re-created the crowded-stateroom scene from the Marx Brothers’ “A Night at the Opera.” Funny guy.
