Mad: The Complete Harvey Kurtzman Years

In 1952, the first MAD comic was created as a way for the writer/editor/artist Harvey Kurtzman to do something quick and easy in between his elaborately researched war comics for EC. Against all odds, sales success soon turned it into his main job and inspired him to expand from goofy parodies of other comics into even zanier satires that revealed to the kids of America how hypocritical the adults, and entire structure of society and capitalism around them, truly were.

The core artists - Will Elder, Wallace Wood, Jack Davis and at first John Severin - all found themselves inspired by the opportunity to turn from horror or adventure comics to humor, turning out some of the best work of their comics careers - and going on to mainstream success from their name recognition MAD gave them.

By 1955, Kurtzman was ready to move on to grown-up magazine publishing - but seized an opportunity to convert MAD into a magazine first. With the same stable of artists, and a few new contributors from TV (Ernie Kovacs, Roger Price), radio (Stan Freberg) and newspapers, he converted the color comic to a black-and-white magazine that aimed its satire at kids and adults alike - and went on to even greater success. Kurtzman himself, and most of his artists, moved on after five issues. Those five issues, alongside the initial 23 comics, are given their first complete reprint here. A final volume adds two legacy issues containing Kurtzman's final completed work, plus a fold-out gallery of alternate reprint covers over the decades, a trove of archival material and comprehensively illustrated text detailing MAD's development, impact and sustained influence. A plexi-windowed slipcase shows Alfred E. Neuman, the future of MAD, looking inside the box at its history.

These are the issues that shaped the sensibilities of just about all American humor for decades to come - finally available in one place for the first time.