Posted By Dan Greenfield on May 2, 2025 | 4 comments

13 HIGHLIGHTS from 1955’s Mad #24…

By PETER BOSCH

In the beginning was the comic book. And it was brilliant. But all things must change over time or perish. And William M. Gaines’ publishing company, Educational Comics Inc., needed to change.

Dr. Frederic Wertham had done his damage to the industry by writing about what he felt were hostile effects of comic books on children, and by speaking before a 1954 Senate subcommittee hearing about comics causing juvenile delinquency. Then came the Comics Code Authority. It was hard to be funny when you had to go through censors first.

However, the reason that Mad transformed from comic book to mag was because editor Harvey Kurtzman had been offered a job by a magazine (which he knew got respect while comic books did not). Gaines wanted to keep him and he suggested turning Mad into a magazine — which would also allow it to not be subject to the Comics Code.

Mad #1, Harvey Kurtzman art

Kurtzman stayed on as editor and chief writer and Mad #24 (July 1955) hit the newsstands on May 2, 1955 — 70 years ago. The comic’s top three artists were still on board: Wallace Wood, Bill Elder, and Jack Davis. That first magazine issue also contained an article by Ernie Kovacs, one of the nation’s most prominent humorists and a major TV star of that time. (Soon, others who wanted to be part of the new magazine were Stan Freberg, Sid Caesar, Danny Kaye, Bob and Ray, and Steve Allen, all of whom made American TV viewers laugh every week.)

The new Mad magazine had a delayed reaction but several issues later, it became a hit. However, Kurtzman couldn’t resist when Playboy’s Hugh Hefner offered to produce his own humor magazine, Trump, and he left after Mad #28 (Spring 1956). (It turned out to be the wrong decision because Hefner cancelled Trump after the second issue for being too expensive.) Gaines asked Al Feldstein, a former EC artist and editor, to take over Mad, which he did. Feldstein held the position for the decades of the magazine’s greatest success.

Mad #23

In celebration of the 70th anniversary of the first Mad magazine, here are 13 HIGHLIGHTS from the seminal Mad #24:

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Cover art. The border drawings around the cover message were drawn by Kurtzman and every important figure in history is shown reading Mad. Well, except for the guy holding a copy of Mad who is looking at Marilyn Monroe, but can you blame him? Note Alfred E. Neuman is pictured at top center, but as yet officially unnamed. However, they did use him for different functions, from characters within the articles (in this issue his image is given the moniker “Melvin Coznowski”) and as a writer’s pseudonym for Al Feldstein when he didn’t want readers to think there was no one else writing the articles after he took over the editor’s chair with #29 (Sept. 1956).

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Editorial Page. A simple message, illustrated and written by Kurtzman, and it was actually what Gaines and company needed the newsstand reader to do: “Please buy this magazine.”

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(All the below pages were written by Kurtzman, unless otherwise noted.)

Gluggle! Movie Ad. Before the reader gets to the contents page, Wood does his take on the Jane Russell movie poster for Underwater! (1955) and, in his version, sharks are not the only thing she has to worry about.

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Contents Page: Of course, leave it to Kurtzman to design a contents page without the list being in numerical page order, going instead for an alphabetical approach. Kurtzman gives byline credit to the artists who drew the articles without mentioning anywhere he wrote them. As to the contributors at the bottom, the picture of Ernie Kovacs was of him as his show’s humorous character, Percy Dovetonsils.

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Is A Trip To the Moon Possible? A 10-page article on the folly of space travel at that time was highlighted by three dozen glorious Wood drawings, doing what he did better than anyone: illustrating rockets in outer space!

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Out of the Frying Pan and Into the Soup. Bernie Krigstein’s final work for Mad was just this single page illustrating the opening of an off-the-wall text novelette about war, love, a floating phone booth, and false teeth.

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Wrestling. Another 10-page piece, brilliantly lampooning the “art” of wrestling. The opening page by Jack Davis shows that the best parts of wrestling bouts is sometimes observing the audience, not the men in the ring.

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Comic strips. Bill Elder expertly copies the styles of several popular newspaper comic strips’ artists.

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Is This Your Life? Mad #24’s satire of the popular TV series, This is Your Life, was a nine-page feature with hilarious art by Bill Elder. On the actual television program, host Ralph Edwards would surprise someone in the audience and bring them onstage where he would read from a volume detailing their life, and he or she would be visited from people from their past. This occasionally got into featuring celebrities, who just happened to be in the audience that night, as the surprised guest.

Elder perfectly captured the opening moments with his full-page drawing of Edwards wandering through the audience. So many seated upfront are easily identifiable, but the humor lay in them and the events of the 1950s, including a Department of Sanitation worker eyeing the Lone Ranger’s horse, Silver; Jack Webb as Dragnet’s Joe Friday handcuffed to the juvenile delinquent in the row in front of him, but with her face obscured because she is underage; in place of the toy duck with a $100 prize that would drop when someone said the “secret word” on Groucho Marx’s program You Bet Your Life, Donald Duck is coming down and is none too happy about it; and at middle far right, Arthur Godfrey is sitting back listening to his earphones, not knowing they are connected to a detonator a few rows back manned by singer Julius La Rosa, whom Godfrey fired on-air during a live broadcast. Oh, and near bottom right, Dr. Frederic Wertham is enjoying a horror comic book.

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Tom Swiffft and His Electronic Ping Pong Ball. A hysterical, two-page spoof of the adventures of brilliant teenage inventor Tom Swift, by Ernie Kovacs with spot drawings by Elder.

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Vera’s Cruz. During their comic book era, movie satires were a standard thing but they got bigger and better in the magazines. Starting it off was a takeoff of the Gary Cooper-Burt Lancaster Western, Vera Cruz (1954), retitled here as “Vera’s Cruz.” And what an action full-page by Jack Davis to get it going!

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Bind-Aig. Mad ribbed many an ad from early on but never more brilliantly than in their magazine versions. (Several columns could be written just on the ad imitations!) On the left is the original Band-Aid magazine advertisement and on the right is Mad’s, drawn by Bill Elder.

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Jell-Y. Mad #24 closed out the issue with a back cover featuring another Elder-drawn ad, this time making fun of a series of Jell-O print advertisements that featured cartoon animals, birds, and various sea life enjoying the dessert. Left, an original ad; right, Mad’s.

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MORE

— The Singularly Inventive EC COMICS Art of BERNIE KRIGSTEIN. Click here.

— Dig These 13 Fabulous Movie Posters by the Great JACK DAVIS. Click here.

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13th Dimension contributor-at-large PETER BOSCH’s first book, American TV Comic Books: 1940s-1980s – From the Small Screen to the Printed Page, was published by TwoMorrows. (You can buy it here.) A sequel, American Movie Comic Books: 1930s-1970s — From the Silver Screen to the Printed Page, is due in 2025. (You can pre-order here.) Peter has written articles and conducted celebrity interviews for various magazines and newspapers. He lives in Hollywood.