MAD MEN

Spotlight

The founding lunatics of Mad celebrate the magazine company’s 60th anniversary in the mind of caricaturist Mort Drucker, at least

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hey were just a kooky group of young geniuses before they became famous as "the usual gang of idiots." Mort Drucker, the caricaturist who taught generations of kids to see movie stars, politicians, and the rest of the rulers of adult society as ridiculous cartoons, remembers his friends from the glorious glory days of the early Mad magazine with a sly smirk. "We were all a little crazy," he says. "We invented it from scratch, and we kept pushing to the limit, and we changed the way young people looked at the world."

Sixty years ago this spring, William M. Gaines launched the company that started Mad—Entertaining Comics—from the detritus of a crumbling, minor publishing outfit he'd inherited from his dad. "Mad was Bill's vehicle to kick the ass of his father and everything he represented," recalls Al Feldstein, the editor who ran Mad for nearly 30 years, during which time it became an institution of institutionbashing. (For full details, I heartily urge reading the new book, by me, The Ten-Cent Plague: The Great Comic-Book Scare and How It Changed America.)

To honor Mad's madcap start-up team—and what could very well have been, in the late 40s and early 50s, the first stirrings of the counterculture (pre-Beats, pre-rock-'n'-roll)—Drucker (in illustration, in dark sweater) imagines a gathering at Gaines's old family apartment on Fort Hamilton Parkway, in Brooklyn. Here assembled: Mad's original editor, the creative whirligig Harvey Kurtzman (upper left, lifting goblet); Will "Chicken Fat" Elder (above Drucker, in baseball cap), co-creator of the publication's hyperactive visual style; publisher and benevolent king of the Mad empire, Gaines (seated, with the eternally unworried Mad mascot, Alfred E. Neuman, perched upon his knee)—and the rest of the nutball fellowship.

DAVID HAJDU