Over on the Time Magazine website, Richard Corliss is doing some excellent articles about EC Comics. This one is about the horror era and this one is about Harvey Kurtzman and MAD.
I agree with most of what's in these two articles though I have a higher opinion of MAD as edited by Al Feldstein than Mr. Corliss does. Recently in an EC e-mail discussion group, another writer was comparing and contrasting the Kurtzman MAD with the one edited quite lucratively by his successor. I said that I never saw the point in such a contest. For all creative concerns, they were two different magazines with little more in common than the name, the parent company and the fact that Wally Wood drew for both for a while. In fact, I'll go so far as to say that so many historians are so understandably in love with the Kurtzman MAD (and knew it first) that they have a hard time seeing the joys of the magazine that replaced it when Kurtzman departed. I love 'em both and don't see why I have to choose…or belittle one in order to sing the praises of the other. It is also perhaps worth noting that Kurtzman and Feldstein weren't even trying to do the same magazine or to do it the same way…and that fondness for either has a lot to do with when you started reading and which pop culture references were yours.