Mad #21
☆ Be the first to review + Add to your collection — Join freeMad #21 (March 1955) marks the first cover appearance of the gap-toothed, carefree face that would become Alfred E. Neuman — tucked into Harvey Kurtzman's densely packed parody of Johnson Smith & Co. novelty catalogue ads, the unnamed figure made his debut on the title's front cover, one step toward becoming the most recognized mascot in American humor publishing. The issue also captures Kurtzman's Mad at the peak of its comic-book ambition: in the same month EC's horror and crime titles were collapsing under Comics Code pressure, this issue demonstrated that pop-culture parody — of newspaper comic strips, Hollywood blockbusters, and even the medium's own mail-order ad culture — was a creative mode durable enough to outlast the entire EC line. Sitting just three issues before the landmark switch to magazine format, #21 belongs to the tense, fertile final chapter of Mad-as-comic-book, when Kurtzman's crew was simultaneously at its most inventive and most aware that the clock was running out.
In "Poopeye!", Harvey Kurtzman and Bill Elder deliver a delightfully absurd parody of mid-20th-century advertising culture, skewering everything from dubious self-improvement schemes to laughably over-the-top products. With Harvey Kurtzman’s sharp satire and Bill Elder’s wild, expressive art—inked by Elder himself and colored by Marie Severin—this 1955 EC classic turns mundane ads into surreal, laugh-out-loud absurdities, all framed by Kurtzman’s own bold cover art.
A sly, satirical take on 1950s comic book ads, "Comic Book Ads!" in Mad #21 skewers the era’s over-the-top gimmicks with mock promotions for things like hypnotism guides, prize-money schemes, and a rubber bubble gum that never dissolves—each more absurd than the last. With deadpan delivery and exaggerated claims, the parody captures the wild, unserious spirit of the medium’s self-promotion, all drawn in Mad’s signature sharp, cartoonish style.
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All four interior stories were scripted by Harvey Kurtzman, who also drew the cover himself — a faux novelty-catalogue page that continued his practice of disguising Mad as an entirely different publication to catch newsstand browsers off guard. The core EC artistic trio of Will Elder, Jack Davis, and Wally Wood each handled an interior story, reflecting the stable creative arrangement that had defined the book since its 1952 debut. By early 1955, EC publisher William Gaines was already fielding Kurtzman's demands to convert Mad into a magazine format; the format change would arrive with issue #24 just four months later, driven not by a desire to dodge the Comics Code — as popular myth has it — but by Kurtzman's receipt of a competing offer from Pageant magazine and his long-standing ambition to enter slick-magazine publishing.
Trivia · 7 facts
- First cover appearance of 'Alfred' — the unnamed gap-toothed figure later named Alfred E. Neuman — embedded as a tiny illustration within the cover's parody of the Johnson Smith & Co. novelty mail-order catalogue.
- The Alfred face had previously appeared in 1954 on the cover of the Ballantine reprint anthology The Mad Reader, making issue #21 his second overall appearance but his first on an actual Mad comic-book cover.
- All interior scripts are by Harvey Kurtzman; art is by Will Elder ('Poopeye!' — an 8-page Popeye parody), Jack Davis ('Slow Motion!' — a 6-page sports vignette piece), and Wally Wood ('Under the Waterfront!' — a 6-page parody of the 1954 film On the Waterfront).
- The cover design — styled as a page crammed with fake mail-order ads — was part of Kurtzman's deliberate series of 'disguise covers'; previous issues had mimicked Life magazine, a scientific journal, a horse-racing form, and a school notebook.
- The Popeye parody 'Poopeye!' pits the spinach-eating sailor against multiple comic-strip strongmen including stand-ins for Tarzan and Superman ('Clark Bent'), making it one of the broadest multi-target genre satires in the comic-book run.
- Material from this issue was reprinted in the Ballantine paperback Mad Strikes Back (1955), The Complete Color Mad (Russ Cochran, 1987), Tales Calculated to Drive You Mad #7 (EC, 1999), and The Mad Archives Vol. 4 (DC, 2012/2013).
- Issue #21 is one of only three remaining comic-book-format Mad issues before the title converted to magazine format with #24 (July 1955), making it part of the final, historically charged stretch of the 23-issue comic-book run.
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Reprints
Reprinted in Mad Strikes Back #[nn] (1955), Inside Mad #124 (1955), The Bedside Mad #S1647 (1959), Mad Strikes Back #491K (1961), The Bedside Mad #D2316 (1964), The Bedside Mad #P3520 (1968), Mad Strikes Back #01564 (1969), Mad Special [Mad Super Special] #9 (1972), Mad Strikes Back #03373-6 (1973), Mad Special [Mad Super Special] #21 (1976), The Bedside Mad #6 (88-893) (1979), The Complete Color Mad #4 (1987), Mad about the Fifties #[nn] (1997), Tales Calculated to Drive You Mad #7 (1999), Mad Strikes Back #[nn] (2002), Mad about Comic Strips #[nn] (2003), The Mad Archives #4 (2013), Mad's Original Idiots Jack Davis #[nn] (2015), Mad's Original Idiots Wally Wood #[nn] (2015), Mad's Original Idiots Will Elder #[nn] (2015), Mad #35 (2024)
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