![]() ![]() “Probably the central theme of MAD is skewering hypocrisy, and the early 50s was a time of incredible hypocrisy. “Since they grew up during the Great Depression, I think satire was their way of criticizing the excesses and pitfalls of capitalism,” Schelly says. “Mickey Rodent!” by Kurtzman and Elder from Mad #19 (1955). Although many went to the newly opened Music and Art High School in New York, the book raises the question of why they so ardently embraced satire. But in addition to the detail about why Kurtzman invented MAD are chapters about his childhood, and the early friends who became part of his lifelong comics circle. Harvey Kurtzman: The Man Who Created MAD and Revolutionized Humor in America is exhaustively researched: The book is 642 pages, and the footnotes alone take up 27 of them. The magazine under Kurtzman wouldn’t have been a predictable quantity, which probably means it wouldn’t have sold as well.” Spy' and 'The Lighter Side of …' for decades. “He never would have run features like 'Spy vs. “Others used what he did as a template, but an imitation can never match up to the original.” Schelly said. As soon as Kurtzman left the magazine in 1956, the satire in MAD lost much of its nuanced relevance. MAD made a lasting impact on comics artists like R. That’s why I wanted to write this biography.” “Their ‘war is hell’ theme really hit home to me, a 19-year-old eligible for the draft in 1970," he says." By then, I knew Harvey Kurtzman’s name, and always wanted to know more about what made him tick, and how he created those brilliant comics. An avid comic-book reader in his youth, Schelly discovered Kurtzman’s serious war stories in EC comics’ Two-Fisted Tales and Frontline Combat, which were published in the early 1950s at the same time as MAD. “His name was omitted," he says, "but that didn’t stop me from laughing myself sick over stories like ‘Superduperman’ and ‘Woman Wonder!’” Kurtzman took aim at popular culture with parodies of brand-name heroes like these, which, while full of in-jokes, appealed to every boy of a certain age. Schelly became a Kurtzman fan before he knew his name, via the frequent MAD paperbacks of the 1960s that reprinted many of his best comics. I believe the questioning of authority in MAD led in some way to the counterculture moment of the 1960s and the anti-Vietnam war protests.” “That kind of self-referential satire became the primary mode of humor in American culture, from Saturday Night Live to The Simpsons. “In MAD, Kurtzman challenged the repressive status quo in the early 1950s by satirizing cultural figures, politicians, and rampant consumerism,” Schelly told me in an email.
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