Mad #6

From the earliest days of EC's irreverent humor experiment comes Mad #6 (1953), cover-priced at a dime and promising "Tales Calculated to Drive You Mad." Harvey Kurtzman's cover art delivers the gag perfectly: a group of armed, pint-sized expedition members huddles together on what is unmistakably a gigantic hand emerging from a jungle lagoon, one of them insisting via speech balloon that "the story of a monster living here is a fake" — blissfully unaware of the enormous tentacle lurking in the background. It's the kind of deadpan, self-undermining humor that made Mad a genuine phenomenon in 1953, and this issue also features interior work by Wally Wood with coloring by Marie Severin.