Here we have an article about the humble beginnings of MAD Magazine. I thought you might like to see it and I thought I'd correct this paragraph from it…
Staff writer and artist Harvey Kurtzman brought in the idea for MAD. The first issue hit the stands in 1952, and parodied their own genre specialty of horror. Gap-toothed mascot Alfred E. Newman didn't become the poster child until four years later. Gaines sold the company in the early 1960s to Warner/DC Comics, which meant the end of the tenure at 225 Lafayette Street.
Harvey Kurtzman was a writer and artist for the company but more importantly, he was an editor. MAD did parody (a little) the company's own horror comics but mainly, it parodied other things like radio shows and other comics. Alfred E. Neuman (with a "U") did become the magazine's cover boy in 1956 but his first appearance on a MAD cover was a paperback book, The MAD Reader published in 1954.
Now, here's the history no one seems to get right: William M. Gaines sold MAD in 1961 not to Warner/DC Comics but to Premier Industries, a corporation that had started out as a manufacturer of venetian blinds. At about the same time, MAD moved from its Lafayette Street office but not because of the acquisition. They moved because the Lafayette Street offices kept being burgled.
Premier owned it for a while via a contract that guaranteed Gaines they would not interfere with his business. A few years later, they sold MAD to their distributor, Independent News, which was a division of DC Comics. This was before DC was acquired by Kinney National Services, Inc., which later acquired Time and Warner Brothers and darn near everything in the world that Disney doesn't own.
From Lafayette Street, MAD moved to 850 Third Avenue and then to 485 MADison Avenue. Those moves had nothing to do with corporate ownership. In early 1995 though, they were moved into the same New York building that housed DC Comics — 1700 Broadway, right across the street from the Ed Sullivan Theater. After DC was moved to Burbank, California, MAD was moved down to a building on Avenue of the Americas. In October of 2017, my friend Amber and I visited that office, which was already closing down.
There was a giant MAD logo which had been removed from its place on a wall, in preparation of being shipped out to the new offices in Burbank. A few months later when I first visited those new offices, that giant MAD logo was resting on a floor, waiting for someone to come by and mount it on the wall there. I wonder where it'll wind up.