No EC titles survived the purge except Mad, which escaped the Comics Code by expanding its trim size to become a “magazine”-and this new, adaptable hybrid format was the key to its longevity. Gaines, on a promotional tour in the early nineteen-seventies, when the magazine was most overtly political. The problems are economic and social, and they are complex.” His testimony was not persuasive, and the hearings resulted in EC and other comic publishers acquiescing to self-censorship, necessitating the creation of a Comics Code Authority, which would henceforth review every issue of every title before granting permission to display a “Seal of Approval,” without which the comics could not be sold. are contributing factors to many children’s maladjustment.” Gaines was called to testify, and disputed the arguments in Wertham’s book, insisting that “delinquency is the product of the real environment in which the child lives and not of the fiction he reads. . . . In the spring of 1954, the United States Senate Subcommittee on Juvenile Delinquency held hearings in New York City on the menace of comics, largely prompted by the notoriety of the psychiatrist Fredric Wertham’s best-selling book “ Seduction of the Innocent,” which contended that “chronic stimulation, temptation and seduction by comic books . . . Readers loved Mad’s exuberantly lowbrow tone: an early, anonymous letter declared, “What you publish is cheap, miserable trash! Fortunately, I also am cheap miserable trash!” The June, 1954, cover was styled like a literary journal, so that readers “ashamed to read this comic-book in subways and like that” could make “people think you are reading high-class intellectual stuff instead of miserable junk.” The first Mad story was a frenzied, ridiculous haunted-house tale called “ Hoohah!” Later issues branched into satire of television, movies, and literature, all done by Kurtzman in the same frantic, punning style (“Dragged Net!” “Flesh Garden!” “Shermlock Shomes!”). Kurtzman’s “ Tales Calculated to Drive You MAD” (subtitled “Humor in a Jugular Vein”) began as a parody of other EC titles, using the same artists-Jack Davis, Will Elder, Wally Wood, John Severin-to spoof their own over-the-top horror vignettes. Gaines, the publisher of EC Comics, a New York imprint responsible for the bloody and garish “ Tales From the Crypt” and other successful horror, war, and crime titles, invited the staff contributor Harvey Kurtzman to launch a humor title. The California painter and critic Manny Farber extolled “termite art” as occurring “where the spotlight of culture is nowhere in evidence, so that the craftsman can be ornery, wasteful, stubbornly self-involved, doing go-for-broke art and not caring what comes of it.” That need for art to be ugly, to go where it is not wanted, burrowing destructive channels into sacrosanct carpentry, was essential to the creation of Mad magazine, which announced this month that it is ceasing publication. Photograph from The Advertising Archives / Alamy Neuman’s misaligned features and insouciant grin graced nearly every cover of Mad magazine, which is ceasing publication after sixty-seven years.
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