Above: a 1963 photo of Bill Gaines entering the MAD offices. Poking their heads out of the door are (from top to bottom): Nick Meglin, John Putnam, Al Feldstein, Leonard Brenner, Nelson Tirado, and Jerry De Fuccio.
MooPig's Favorite Post-Modernist is Bill Gaines
by Pat Darnell | June 16, 2011 | Bryan TX
What it means to think like a postmodernist - National cognitive science | Examiner.com: "Godel’s incompleteness theorem)."
1952
Bill Gaines knew that the man who would edit MAD had to have a brilliant sense of humor as well as a groundbreaking visual sense. He had to be a man who could see through the phoniness of popular culture. And he had to be a man who could take a little 10-cent comic book and transform it into the premiere satirical force of the 20th century.
Unfortunately, that man was busy, so Gaines hired Harvey Kurtzman.
Also, in 1952...
The second issue of MAD goes on sale on December 9, 1952. On December 11, the first-ever letter complaining that MAD "just isn't as funny and original like it used to be" arrives.
1954
The storybook marriage of baseball legend Joe DiMaggio and tinseltown bombshell Marilyn Monroe soon goes sour due to MAD's corrosive influence. Joe becomes enraged as he watches Marilyn film a movie scene standing over a subway grating, her dress flying high in the breeze. Insiders assume DiMaggio is outraged because hundreds of drooling onlookers are ogling his wife's exposed thighs and buttocks. But what REALLY infuriates the Yankee Clipper is that his wife would debase herself in public by reading MAD.
July 1955
MAD Magazine is born (#24). Gaines and Kurtzman turn MAD into a bi-monthly, black-and-white magazine. More importantly, they get to raise the price from 10-cents to a quarter! Although it will be another year before he's named and adopted as MAD's official mascot, Alfred E. Neuman makes his first appearance on the border of MAD (#24) as the "What, Me Worry" Kid
Also, in 1955...
Not all the legal news is good for Bill Gaines and MAD. Without video games or rap music to pick on, Congress is forced to hold hearings on the dangers of comic books. This poses a direct threat to Gaines' varied line of titles: Tales from the Crypt, Crypt of Terror, The Terrible Crypt, The Terrorizingly Terrible Crypt Tales, and MAD. Gaines volunteers to testify before a Senate committee. It does not go well:
Also in 1955, MooPig's Founder, Pat Darnell, is Born in Ft Worth, TX ... June 4th .... during a tornadic thunderstorm.
___________Reference
http://www.examiner.com/cognitive-science-in-national/what-it-means-to-think-like-a-postmodernist
http://www.dccomics.com/mad/about/?action=about1
1 comment:
Cool photo of my dad, Leonard Brenner, and his co-workers.
Post a Comment