"Tam" wrote to ask…
Obviously those great early MAD parodies of DC superheroes, such as "Superduperman" and "Bats Man" from the 1950s are pretty well known but did MAD ever parody Marvel comics (prior to them appearing on the screen) and if so, what were the earliest examples?
Nope. MAD pretty much gave up parodying comic books of any sort when MAD became a magazine and when Al Feldstein took over from Harvey Kurtzman as its editor. For those who don't know, MAD was a 10-cent comic book sold on comic book racks for its first 23 issues and in those issues, Kurtzman as editor-writer did "Superduperman" (MAD #4), "Black and Blue Hawks" (#5), "Melvin of the Apes" (#6), "Bat Boy and Rubin" (#8), "Woman Wonder" (#10), "Starchie" (#12), "Plastic Sam" (#14") and a few others, plus a number of parodies of newspaper comic strips.
There were no Marvel parodies because in those years, Marvel wasn't publishing anything worth parodying. When MAD became a magazine, they began aiming at more widely-read (or widely-watched) targets. Newspaper strips were okay. Comic books weren't. Feldstein, in fact, was very pleased to be out of the comic book business and didn't even look at what other companies were publishing. When they did spoof something like Superman, it was the Superman newspaper strip they were parodying, not the concurrent comic books. They did almost nothing about Marvel until, long after Feldstein had retired, they took on a few Marvel movies.
If you'd asked Al just before he left why they didn't do comic book parodies, I suspect he'd have said something like "MAD is selling over a million copies per issue. The best-selling comic book sells 300,000 or less. Most of our readers won't be familiar with what we'd be making fun of."
