Mad #16

Mad #16 from 1954 arrives in the magazine's signature mock-newspaper format, with the bold "MAD" masthead dominating a yellow broadsheet cover that cheekily bills itself as "Tales Calculated to Drive You Mad — Humor in a Jugular Vein." Harvey Kurtzman's cover art presents two newspaper-style photo panels: one depicting a cartoonish "Comic-Book Raid" scene with a wild-haired suspect and stern detectives, and another showing a comic-book publisher covertly selling his wares on a street corner to wide-eyed passersby. It's a gleefully self-aware package — EC's satirical powerhouse poking fun at the very comic-book controversies swirling around the industry in 1954, all for a dime.