Here's a piece that ran on The History Channel a few years ago about the origins of MAD magazine. It's interesting because despite on-camera interviews with two people who knew better, it manages to get the history all wrong and it makes no mention of MAD's founding editor-writer, Harvey Kurtzman. Publisher William M. Gaines, who deserves some of the credit gets all of it.
It makes it sound like ol' Doc Wertham single-handedly created the anti-comic book hysteria of the fifties (he had a lot of help) and it repeats the errant notion that MAD went from being a color comic book to a black-and-white magazine to escape comic book censorship. Here's what really happened…
Harvey Kurtzman wrote and edited the comic book issues. He probably should also be acknowledged as the creator of the publication since the most Gaines used to claim was that he suggested that Kurtzman whip up a humor comic…and sometimes, Gaines would kind of vaguely say he came up with the title. No one has ever suggested that the contents, format and underlying philosophy didn't come from Kurtzman.
Harvey loved doing comic books but he hated the cheapness and the low status of the form. Mingling as he did with people involved in what he saw as "real publishing," he was embarrassed to admit what he did for a living. And if people said that the crime and horror comics Gaines published were disgraceful, Kurtzman was inclined to agree. Comics paid badly, they were printed badly, they were targeted at children. That was how he felt and he suggested to Gaines that MAD, which was enjoying great sales as a comic book, be turned into a magazine. It would be a way for Harvey to do comics without being in the low-prestige comic book industry.
Gaines said no at first. Gaines was anti-expansion and preferred to keep his business small and simple. But then Kurtzman got an offer to go to work at Pageant magazine — then, a successful and more prestigious publication — and he told Gaines he was taking it.
Bill Gaines was then-convinced that Kurtzman (the guy not mentioned in this documentary about the beginnings of MAD) was irreplaceable and he countered with an offer to make Harvey's idea a reality and turn MAD into a slick magazine. Kurtzman stayed on — until he later got a better offer from Hugh Hefner — and presided over MAD's conversion. The move was not done to escape censorship, which was not then a serious threat. Not long after though, the change became a happy side effect. When such banning did happen, MAD was safe.
This history has never been a secret. If the History Channel was owned by Time-Warner, which has occasionally preferred to forget Kurtzman, I could understand his omission here…but the network is a joint venture of Hearst and Disney. So I don't know why this is so wrong…