MAD Man
by Tom Tomorrow
I grew up on MAD Magazine, and it had a profound impact on both my creative sensibilities and my general outlook on the world. Through the subversive satire of MAD, a whole generation of kids in the 1960s and 1970s learned to distrust advertising, politicians, and authority in general—all of which turned out to be lessons that would serve me well in life. And on a specifically personal note, it’s obvious that I was heavily influenced by the magazine’s text-heavy movie and TV parodies. Whenever someone suggests that my cartoons have “too many words,” I just want to say: have you ever seen an issue of the 20th century’s preeminent journal of satire and whimsical commentary, cleverly disguised as a comic magazine for children?
MAD was published by the legendary William M. Gaines, a man seemingly born to the job. The American comic book itself had, arguably, been invented by his father, Max. In 1933, Gaines père was employed as a salesman at Eastern Color Printing when he took advantage of some unused printing presses to package newspaper comic strips into bound booklets. Funnies on Parade turned out to be an enormous hit, and Gaines went on to found two companies of his own: All-American Publications (later merged into what became DC Comics), and then Educational Comics, or EC for short.
When Max was killed in a motorboat accident in 1947, his n’er-do-well son Bill took over the family business, and within a few years began publishing MAD in its original comic book format, along with a variety of suspense, science fiction, and horror titles—a body of work that would one day land him before a U.S. Senate subcommittee. There, he was interrogated by Tennessee Senator Estes Kefauver, who was less than appreciative of his contributions to American culture.
“This seems to be a man with a bloody axe holding a woman’s head up which has been severed from her body,” Kefauver famously said at one point. “Do you think that is in good taste?”
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