02. Mad Letterhead (1955-56)
"He received an attractive offer from Pageant to come in as assistant to the editor-in-chief and was considering it when Mad's publisher, William Gaines, made him an even more attractive counteroffer--a carte blanche go-ahead on a pet Kurtzman daydream: the upgrading of Mad from a comic book to an all-round satire magazine that would make use of written text, photographs and other special feature material in addition to the comic strip technique. This new Mad allowed Kurtzman and his cronies to stretch their wings and soar into areas of humor hitherto denied them."
-Rolf Malcolm, Playboy, Dec 1957"Mad was almost as significant a cultural depth charge of the nineteen-fifties as Elvis was. (I came across my first issue in 1956 or so and immediately phoned two friends. All they heard on the line, before they hung up, was convulsive laughter.)"
"I think Harvey's Mad was more important than pot and LSD in shaping the generation that protested the Vietnam war."
-Art Spiegelman, The New Yorker, 1993