3/2/2024 0 Comments Alfred madStuff may have codified the image, giving the boy the sleepy grin and tilted posture, but earlier iterations suggested that his caricature was itself a modified copy. Every graphic centered on a portrait of a kid with mussed red hair, saucer ears, and a shit-eating grin, minus a tooth. He was there on a 1942 matchbook for an auto-parts store in Longhorn, Texas on the label of Happy Jack, a soda produced in 1939 on the menu for a coffee shop in Ashland, Nebraska in a 1908 calendar for antikamnia, a cure-all painkiller spiked with heroin in a 1905 ad for “painless dentistry,” beneath the quip, IT DIDN’T HURT A BIT! and in a 1902 playbill for Maloney’s Wedding Day, a small-market musical comedy. The image that Kurtzman first discovered on that postcard turned out to be an itinerant orphan of low-budget advertising, with a trail of appearances dating back to the early twentieth century. To help fight the infringement claim, MAD searched for and solicited from its readers evidence of the boy’s existence before 1914. Neuman, the plaintiff claimed, was a copy of Stuff’s caricature “The Original Optimist,” also known as “Me-worry?”, which he had copyrighted in 1914. A pseudonym without a specific host, it was one of many counterfeit names used as running gags in the magazine.īy 1965, when the face had grown in stature to become a familiar punch line in the national culture, the widow of a cartoonist named Harry Spencer Stuff brought a lawsuit against MAD. But I want him to have this devil-may-care attitude, someone who can maintain a sense of humor while the world is collapsing around him.” MAD insiders referred to the kid by various names-Mel Haney, Melvin Cowsnofsky-but when the magazine won legal rights to the face, he was officially christened Alfred E. Beginning with the Neuman assignment, he ended up painting most of MAD’s covers for the next twenty years.įor the half-length color painting of their red-haired mascot, Feldstein told Mingo that he didn’t want the boy to “look like an idiot-I want him to be lovable and have an intelligence behind his eyes. A born-again Christian, Mingo recoiled when he first visited the magazine’s headquarters at 485 “MADison Avenue,” but his luxuriant style was a perfect fit for the burgeoning publication, and he needed the work. He was near retirement when he responded to a New York Times ad that read ILLUSTRATOR WANTED. A sixty-year-old veteran of commercial illustration, Mingo’s specialty was Vargas-style pinups and Norman Rockwell–esque portrayals of middle-class American culture. Club in 2007.įeldstein commissioned Neuman’s first cover portrait from Norman Mingo. “I decided that I wanted to have this visual logo as the image of MAD, the same way that corporations had the Jolly Green Giant and the dog barking at the gramophone for RCA,” Feldstein told the A.V. Mascots by then had become a point of prestige: Playboy had its bunny, The New Yorker had Eustace Tilley, Esquire had the wide-eyed Mr. When Al Feldstein inherited editorial control from Kurtzman in 1956, he made the boy the full-color magazine’s new figurehead. In the corners of MAD’s early issues, Kurtzman deployed the “What, Me Worry?” face as a miniature visual motif that would pop up in the margins of the publication’s densely-packed black-and-white pages. Neuman is forever synonymous with the magazine and its infinite irreverence, but the riddle of his real age may be the trickster’s trump card. It involves, among other things, a plum-pudding advertisement, a dubious lawsuit, and a traveling nineteenth-century farce. Though MAD gave him a purpose, a permanent home, his origin story remains elusive. He’s appeared on almost every MAD cover since: possessing, spoofing, and spooking cultural icons with nothing more than a drowsy rictus. 30 as a write-in candidate for president. The impish, immutable redhead made his official debut in December 1956, when he appeared on the cover of MAD no. Neuman, MAD’s mascot, who turns sixty this year-kind of. In a 1975 interview with the New York Times, MAD Magazine founder Harvey Kurtzman recalled an illustration of a grinning boy he’d spotted on a postcard in the early fifties: a “bumpkin portrait,” “part leering wiseacre, part happy-go-lucky kid.” It was captioned “What, Me Worry?” Postcard that later inspired Norman Mingo’s, Alfred E.
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