Read Ebook {PDF EPUB} Big Mad on Campus by Al Feldstein Al Feldstein. Al Feldstein was a groundbreaking U.S. comic book editor and artist, and one of the mainstays of EC Comics. He had a remarkable career with publisher William M. Gaines' company. His career started off as an artist, writer and editor for seven of the horror and science fiction titles of EC's "New Trend". He later gained fame as the longtime editor-in-chief of MAD Magazine (1956-1985). During his era Mad enjoyed its highest sales. Early life and career Born in 1925 in Brooklyn, New York, Albert Bernard Feldstein was the son of a Russian immigrant father and an American mother. He picked up drawing at an early age, encouraged by his mother and his elementary school teacher to pursue his artistic ambitions. He won a couple of art contests while still a youngster, but initially had the ambition to become a doctor. The family's financial funds didn't allow such an expensive education, since his father had lost his dental lab during the depression. Thus, Al Feldstein enrolled at the High School of Music and Art. After his education, he started working in the comic book industry as an apprentice at Jerry Iger's shop in 1941. He cleaned up pages pencilled by Reed Crandall, Rafael Astarita and Bob Webb, and did all sorts of chores. He eventually got the opportunity to ink and draw some backgrounds on the 'Sheena, Queen of the Jungle' feature for Fiction House. 'The Ol' Skipper', presumably by Al Feldstein (Seven Seas Comics #3, 1946). While attending Brooklyn College by day, he took night classes at the Art Students League. He was in the Air Force during World War II, and created the comic strip 'Baffy' for the Blytheville Air Force base newspaper. Feldstein was also assigned to draw informational posters and slides, and paint service club murals, while additionally painting custom designs on pilot's flight jackets. After his discharge he briefly went back to Iger before turning freelance. He worked as an artist and packager for companies like Fox Comics on such teenage titles as 'Junior', 'Sunny' and 'Meet Corliss Archer'. He was an inker on Fiction House features like 'Hooks Devlin', 'Kayo Kirby' and 'Sky Girl', and also worked on stories for Ace Periodicals ('Hap Hazard', 'Super Mystery'), Aviation Press ('Flight Class'), Universal Phoenix Features ('Seven Seas Comics') and Quality Comics ('Dollman'). 'Dance-Hall Racket' (Crime Patrol #10). EC Comics In February 1948 Feldstein joined Bill Gaines' EC Comics and stayed there until his retirement in 1984. He was initially assigned to set up a teenage comic book called 'Going Steady with Peggy', but the title was dropped before the first issue was published. Instead, Feldstein drew stories for crime and western comic books like Saddle Justice, Crime Patrol and War Against Crime!. During this period, Feldstein also started writing his own stories, and developed a steady bond with publisher Gaines. He would further develop his scriptwriting in EC's famous line of horror, science fiction and suspense comics, which is known as "The New Trend". These comic books stood out for their groundbreaking subject matters, clever plot twists and high quality artwork, in which the artists were free to work in their own style. 'Reflection of Death' (Tales from the Crypt #23 ). But before the official launch of the New Trend comic books, Feldstein and Gaines started printing horror stories in the crime comic books Crime Patrol and War Against Crime!. Within a couple of issues, the titles were renamed to Tales from the Crypt (1950-1955) and The Vault of Horror (1950-1955), respectively, while Gunfighter became The Haunt of Fear (1950-1954). In addition to editing the three horror titles, Feldstein oversaw the production of Weird Science (1950-1953), Weird Fantasy (1950-1953), Crime SuspenStories (1950-1955) and Shock SuspenStories (1952-1955). Feldstein and Gaines drew most of their inspiration from horror radio shows like 'Inner Sanctum', 'The Witches Tale' and Arch Oboler's 'Lights Out', and from the collections of horror and sci-fi stories of the time. They sometimes took plotlines from these pulp novels, changed them, and turned them into comic stories. Short stories by science fiction writer Ray Bradbury were also "borrowed" for EC's fantasy titles. But instead of making a big deal out of it, Bradbury merely suggested they used more of his work, although with a byline and a small financial compensation. According to Feldstein himself, his own writing improved because of the involvement of Bradbury. Unlike other scriptwriters, Feldstein wrote his scripts directly on the boards that would be given to the artists, often resulting in complaints for his copious captions and balloons. During the height of the New Trend, Feldstein wrote four stories a week, based on plot ideas ("springboards") by Gaines. Along with his editing work, it is no surprise that Feldstein eventually dropped his own drawing activities. Although slightly stiff, Feldstein's horror art was in fact very effective and creepy, and trend-setting for EC's horror line, since most of the early covers were by him. He continued to do some of the science fiction covers, while leaving the story art to the capable hands of EC's other artists. The core of the New Trend artist team consisted of Johnny Craig, Graham Ingels, Wallace Wood, Reed Crandall, Frank Frazetta, Jack Kamen, Al Williamson, Joe Orlando, George Evans, Harvey Kurtzman, Jack Davis, John Severin, Bill Elder and Bernie Krigstein. Mad Magazine In 1952, EC had additionally launched a humor comic book called MAD, which was edited by Harvey Kurtzman. Its success prompted Gaines to launch a second humor title in 1954: Panic! Feldstein wrote all of the stories for the first six issues, but he admitted he couldn't give it the attention he wanted to because of his heavy workload. Jack Mendelsohn and Nick Meglin were brought in as additional writers, but the title lasted only twelve issues. It was around the same time that the horror and crime comic books had to be dropped because of the introduction of the highly restrictive Comics Code, which was a result from the condemning book 'Seduction of the Innocent' (1954) by psychologist Dr. Frederic Wertham. Feldstein helped Gaines to make the transition from the New Trend to EC's New Direction comic books and the Picto-Fiction books with illustrated short stories in 1955. Feldstein served as editor for Impact, Valor, Psychoanalysis and M.D., but all these titles lasted only a couple of months. He was forced to try his luck as a freelancer again, and did some scriptwork for features like 'Yellow Claw' for Stan Lee at Atlas. However, Harvey Kurtzman had left MAD in 1956, taking with him most of the artists that worked for him. Feldstein was asked to save the title, which had survived the censorship wave because it was turned from a comic book into a magazine in 1955. Al Feldstein in a MAD ad. Published in issue #62 (April 1961). Photo by Lester Krauss. Feldstein remained with MAD Magazine for 29 years, and made it into the title it is today. He gathered a new artist team around him, called "The Usual Gang of Idiots". With artists like Don Martin, George Woodbridge, Mort Drucker, Norman Mingo, Kelly Freas, Bob Clarke, Dave Berg, Al Jaffee, Angelo Torres, Sergio Aragonés and Antonio Prohias, many of the magazine's classic features came to life, such as Berg's 'Lighter Side', the fold-ins, the movie parodies and 'Spy vs. Spy'. Although Feldstein was heavily criticized by a group of Kurtzman aficionados, MAD's circulation was over a million during the 1960s, and it doubled in the 1970s with over two million copies sold per issue. A ferocious worker and inventive creative, Feldstein was also strong on the business side. He even managed to receive a percentage of the profits, which made him, according to Gaines, "the highest paid editor in the world." Feldstein designed the full-colour art poster which came with Mad Trash issue #8 (1965). One of Feldstein's "EC Revisited" paintings. Recognition In 1994 Al Feldstein received an Inkpot Award and in 2003 he was inducted into the Will Eisner Hall of Fame. In 1999 he received a honorary doctorate of the arts at Rocky Mountain College in Billings, Montana. Final years and death On 31 December 1984, Al Feldstein retired and was succeeded as Mad's editor-in-chief by John Ficarra and Nick Meglin. He sold his home in Connecticut, settled in Jackson Hole, Wyoming, and later bought a ranch near the Yellowstone River in Livingston, Montana. He spent his time making fine art paintings which depicted Western life, while also attending comic book conventions as a featured guest. He briefly came back to the field of comics in 1997 to draw covers for the comic book series 'Tomb Tales', published by Cryptic Comics. He has also returned to his early EC years in a so-called series of "EC Revisited" paintings in the early 1990s. Al Feldstein passed away at the age of 88 in his home in Livingston, Montana, on 29 April 2014. Al Feldstein's EC story 'Seeds of Jupiter' (Weird Science #8) served as the inspiration for the infamous "chestbursting" scene in the sci-fi horror movie 'Alien' (1979) by Ridley Scott and Dan O'Bannon. Al Feldstein obituary. The buttoned-down conformity of 1950s America sparked a sea-change in comedy. The satire of Mort Sahl and brash challenge of Lenny Bruce are considered its cutting edge, but its most influential expression was Mad, a comic book turned magazine that turned on society and the media with an irreverence the effects of which are still being felt today. As the Simpsons' producer Bill Oakley said: "Everyone who was young between 1955 and 1975 read Mad, and that's where your sense of humour came from." The man who made Mad through those years was Al Feldstein, who has died aged 88. Feldstein took over as editor from Harvey Kurtzman in 1956 and ran the magazine until 1985. While it may have lost some of Kurtzman's chaotic visuals, it gained from Feldstein's sharp sense of satire, and his keenness to puncture society's pretensions. At its peak in the 1970s, Mad sold 2m copies per issue, important enough that when it poked fun at J Edgar Hoover, the FBI chief sent agents to Mad's offices to express his displeasure. Mad saw through the advertising industry that sold America Pepsodent smiles and big-finned cars, and ran parodies of movies and television which, in the words of the film critic Roger Ebert, "made me aware of the machine inside the skin, of the way a movie might look original on the outside while inside it was just recycling the same dumb formulas . I did not read the magazine, I plundered it for clues to the universe." Al Feldstein at work at Mad magazine's New York headquarters. Photograph: Jerry Mosey/AP. Mad came to this role naturally. It was an outgrowth of EC Comics, the company that incited Fredric Wertham's wrath in his study Seduction of the Innocent, which accused comics of corrupting the young and saw EC condemned by a US Senate committee for fomenting juvenile delinquency. Just as pulp fictions and film noir undermined the happy consensus of Eisenhower-era adults, EC was puncturing it graphically. Feldstein, who worked feverishly with EC's publisher, William Gaines, to edit and write five titles a month, was at its heart. Feldstein was born in Brooklyn, New York. He showed artistic talent early, winning a poster contest for the New York World's Fair in 1939, and winning admission to the High School of Music & Art in Manhattan. He studied at the Art Students League and began working for comic-book studios, before serving in the army as an artist during the second world war. After the war, he worked in Jerry Iger's studio on titles such as Sheena, Queen of the Jungle, and started freelancing. He was writing and drawing crime, western and teenage stories for Fox Comics when his talent with the female form caught Gaines's attention. "Bill was impressed with the sexuality of the girls I was drawing," Feldstein said. In comics like Going Steady With Peggy, he specialised in tales of high-school romance, featuring well-endowed girls. Gaines had inherited a struggling company from his father, but he and Feldstein clicked, and they soon moved from the standard fare to horror and science-fiction titles such as Tales from the Crypt, Weird Science and Shock Suspense Stories, which boasted adult storylines and a collection of artists who are now renowned in comic-book history. Alongside them Kurtzman was producing a series of classic war comics, and in 1952 he edited the first issue of Mad as a comic book. Skilled artists such as Jack Davis and Wally Wood made the parodies sharp and effective, and Will Elder spiced up stories with what he called "chicken fat": filling panels with visual and verbal non-sequiturs. Mad was so successful that Gaines launched a second comic, Panic, which Feldstein edited. In the wake of the Senate hearings and crackdowns, EC Comics withered. Gaines tried a New Directions series, and Feldstein edited a short- lived comic called Impact, where his social concerns became evident. The story Master Race, produced with the artist Bernie Krigstein for the first issue in 1955, in which a Holocaust survivor spots the commandant of his death camp on the New York subway, became a classic, not least for its prescience in addressing the Holocaust in fiction. In 1955, to escape the censorship of the new Comics Code Authority, Gaines switched Mad to a magazine format. Kurtzman, whose relationship with Gaines was more combative than Feldstein's, soon left, and Feldstein came back as editor. He discovered new talent, including the Spy vs Spy artist Antonio Prohias, Don Martin and Sergio Aragonés, and propelled the now-familiar nebbish visage of Alfred E Neuman to his position as the magazine's public face. But, most importantly, he left no sacred cow unmilked. Feldstein retired from the editorship in 1985, and moved west, to Wyoming and then Paradise Valley, Montana, where he raised horses and llamas on a 270-acre ranch, ran a guest house, and painted. His artwork ranged from science fiction and western themes to impressive landscapes and wildlife paintings. Under Feldstein, Mad's popularity with young people came from aiming its satire at the very people who had condemned EC Comics; parents, teachers, authority. As its longest-serving artist, Al Jaffee, explained in 2010: "Mad was designed to corrupt the minds of children, and from what I'm gathering from the minds of people all over, we succeeded." Feldstein's first marriage ended in divorce, and his second wife, Natalie, died in 1986. He is survived by his third wife, Michelle, five children, and a stepdaughter. Al Feldstein, comic-book artist and editor, born 24 October 1925; died 29 April 2014. An artist turned an idea into a cultural icon: MAD Magazine. Al Feldstein turned his collar against the cold New York City wind. He ducked into a publisher’s office among the tall buildings and felt a moment’s reprieve from the cold. Feldstein, only 13 at the time, needed a job. It was the height of the Depression, and Feldstein’s parents were losing their home. He desperately needed a job and he knew what he wanted to become: an artist. Feldstein, who had no real art experience, said he was laughed out of most of the publishers’ offices, “but one kind editor said ‘why don’t you get a job at a studio servicing the industry and perfect your style and technique of comic book artwork?’” Feldstein says. Feldstein approached the firm of Eisner and Eiger and landed a job at $3 a week running errands and erasing pages in the printing department. But one day he got his big break: the editor asked him to paint the leopard spots on the underwear of “Sheena, Queen of the Jungle.” The best opportunities at commercial art in the 1930s were in, no less, pulp fiction. Comic books like Superman, Batman and Wonder Woman were all the rage, as kids hovered around newsstands on street corners to leaf through the monthly offerings of new comics. Feldstein says he had heard of a kid making $20 a page to illustrate the art. “I couldn’t even afford the ten cents to buy the comic book,” Feldstein says now, looking out over his ranch on the Yellowstone River near Livingston. He never got the job at the publisher, but just out of eighth grade, he was accepted at an art school across town. In the height of the Depression he did what ever it took to earn the bus fare to get to class. He worked as a pin setter at a bowling alley and delivered prescriptions. “My parents could hardly afford to give me a brown bag lunch,” he says. Feldstein, 83, worked his way through the Madison Avenue publishers and by 1950 he and a partner were publishing their own series of comic books. It was a cutthroat business, with publishers competing hard for the coveted spots on the newsstands — and for the attention of young readers. At the time, comics were the cheapest visual entertainment a kid could get. “For 10 cents a kid could put them in their pocket and read them on the subway,” Feldstein said. “There was no television, movies were a little more money and you could only go to them on the weekend. It became quite an industry.” According to Feldstein there were over 600 comic book titles on the stands every month in the 1930s and 1940s. Feldstein’s publisher at the time was producing two science fiction comic books with aliens and rocket ships and they had two crime books. In 1950 they published “The Crypt of Terror,” which evolved into “Tales of the Crypt.” In that competitive, crowded market, Feldstein saw an opportunity among the crime rags and cartoon comics: young adult entertainment. From that early inspiration, MAD magazine was born. Millions of Americans grew up reading the pulp comedy in MAD magazine. But this was not just a job. Feldstein was always a passionate liberal and as an artist he found, through MAD, the ultimate platform for telling others about his beliefs on corporate greed, politics and society. Feldstein lives on 169 acres on the Yellowstone River south of Livingston, but for nearly 30 years he was the editor of MAD magazine, a color newsprint magazine that fed idealism and cynicism to hundreds of thousands of readers each month — mainly young adults. The magazine continues today under the ownership of Time Warner. As its founding editor, Feldstein helped take the magazine from its infancy and a press run of under 300,000 to over 3 million copies. In 1956 Feldstein was at the helm of a magazine title that continues today. The face of MAD magazine was the iconic face of Alfred E. Neuman, the red-haired, freckle-faced boy known for the saying “What, me worry?” Feldstein and his publisher came upon Alfred E. Neuman as a way to brand their magazine. The name “Alfred E. Neuman” was one of Feldstein’s pen names, but the face came from a Ballantine collection of comic books called MAD reader. Feldstein saw the face as a perfect fit to represent MAD magazine. “We were in a society of corporate image logos — the Green Giant, Aunt Jemima, the dog at RCA,” he says. “I felt we had to have a logo and this face looked like a wonderful image to be our visual logo.” Feldstein advertised in the New York Times for a portrait artist to remake the face of Neuman. Norman Mingo, a sketch artist, answered the ad, but and he walked out of the interview when he found out the job was for MAD magazine. Feldstein convinced him to try the portrait, and Mingo went on to create dozens of Neuman facial expressions and covers for MAD. “Alfred was never a real person,” Feldstein says. “He was an evolution of an escape philosophy.” The philosophy of MAD reflected Feldstein’s own social and political bent. “To me MAD was an opportunity to disseminate to the young people a philosophy that they should be very skeptical of what goes on in the country,” Feldstein says. “Madison Avenue could be lying to them, the senators could be lying to them, their parents could be lying to them. “We exposed the shenanigans, through humor, and taught them to think for themselves and read between the lines. That, to me, was the philosophy of MAD.” Rather than staying on the liberal side of the fence, Feldstein lampooned both sides of the political and social spectrum. That tradition at MAD and MAD Television continues today. “I was tolerant of a bipartisan approach,” Feldstein says. “We shot at both sides, liberal and conservative.” That philosophy resounded well with the generation of the 1950s. They found in MAD a voice that had not spoken to the young men and women of the time following World War II. Feldstein capitalized on the magazine industry’s growth. He took MAD magazine from 350,000 issues published quarterly, to eight times a year and annual sales of nearly $3 million. Using the MAD image, the company published 11 foreign editions and had 250 paperback books in print. But there was trouble ahead in the early days of the magazine. Like the McCarthy senate hearings that sought to root out the red evil of communism, a similar movement began to try to quell the rise of what conservatives were calling “juvenile delinquency.” Austrian researcher Frederick Wertham had written a book called “The Seduction of the Innocent” on how comic books were leading to the moral demise of America’s youth. The arch conservatives at the time jumped on the issue. Like president Bush’s “weapons of mass destruction,” 1952 presidential nominee Estes Kefauver found the issue of social ills (including comic books and juvenile delinquency) something he could hang his campaign on, Feldstein remembers. A former mafia boss who was nominated for the vice presidency with Kefauver helped launch a Justice Department inquiry, and they grabbed Wertham as their star witness, Feldstein recalls. “They blamed the comic books for this rising problem (of juvenile delinquency),” Feldstein says. “There were lots of people with agendas who jumped on this problem.” MAD’s competition also wanted them out of business. “We were stealing dimes from Superman, and Marvel and Archie Comics,” Feldstein says. In response to a Senate investigation of the so-called social ills of comic book publishing, a self-governing code of ethics was imposed on comic book publishers. The first thing the code did was list the words publishers couldn’t use in comic book titles — words like “horror, fear, crypt or terror,” Feldstein says. “They also listed subject matters that could not be covered — which included all of ours. They set up this comic book authority and they put us out of business.” MAD was on the ropes. The publisher had to let the artists and writers go, and Feldstein once again found himself walking the streets of New York looking for work. It wasn’t long, though, before Feldstein was hired back. He continued as editor until 1984, when he retired to the Paradise Valley of Montana. He retired from comic book publishing but continues his art work. Feldstein now focuses his artistic talent on creating vibrant, colorful acrylic paintings of landscape, people and wildlife. That young man who discovered art in eighth grade still finds his creative outlet in front of an artist’s easel. His studio in Livingston looks out over a field that falls toward the Yellowstone River. His home is full of animals that his wife rescues or adopts, including a talking parakeet. In front of him on a cold January afternoon is a colorful painting of giraffes that he created from a photograph taken on a recent trip to Africa. “Art is my first love,” he says. Art, he says, is a love first — a business second. “I’m very fortunate that I made my money with MAD,” Feldstein adds. “That’s why I’m living on a ranch in Montana. I was lucky . it was serendipity. I was in the right place at the right time.” Mad magazine's Al Feldstein. FILE - In this 1972 file photo, "Mad" magazine editor Al Feldstein works on page layout in his office at the magazine's New York headquarters. Feldstein, whose 28 years at the helm of Mad transformed the satirical magazine into a pop culture institution, died Tuesday, April 29, 2014. He was 88. (AP Photo/Jerry Mosey, File) ORG XMIT: NY130 Jerry Mosey. Before "The Daily Show," "The Simpsons" or even "Saturday Night Live," Al Feldstein helped show America how to laugh at authority and giggle at popular culture. Millions of young baby boomers looked forward to that day when the new issue of Mad magazine, which Feldstein ran for 28 years, arrived in the mail or on newsstands. Alone in their room, or huddled with friends, they looked for the latest of send-up of the president or of a television commercial. They savored the mystery of the fold-in, where a topical cartoon appeared with a question on top that was answered by collapsing the page and creating a new, and often, hilarious image. Thanks in part to Feldstein, who died Tuesday at his home in Montana at age 88, comics were a fun house tour of current events and the latest crazes. Mad was breakthrough satire for the post-World War II era — the kind of magazine Holden Caulfield of "The Catcher In the Rye" might have founded. "Basically everyone who was young between 1955 and 1975 read Mad, and that's where your sense of humor came from," producer Bill Oakley of "The Simpsons" said. Feldstein's reign at Mad began in 1956. Publisher William M. Gaines had started Mad as a comic book four years earlier and converted it to a magazine to avoid the restrictions of the then-Comics Code and to persuade founding editor Harvey Kurtzman to stay on. But Kurtzman soon departed and Gaines picked Feldstein as his replacement. MAD Paperbacks. In 1955 William Gaines started reprint material from the MAD magazines in black / white paperbacks. The first ever published MAD paperback was 'The MAD Reader', cover art by Norman Mingo. Some of the US paperbacks have also Canadian or United Kingdom printings: The MAD Reader: 11th Canadian, 14th Canadian, 17th Canadian The Bedside MAD: Signet 1st Canadian, 2nd Canadian, 18th UK, 22nd Canadian The Organization MAD: Signet 1st Canadian, 10th UK Like, MAD: Signet 11th UK MAD Ides: Signet 1st Canadian, 6th UK Fighting MAD: Signet 1st Canadian, 2nd Canadian, 7th UK The MAD Frontier: Signet 2nd Canadian, 6th UK MAD in Orbit: Sig 1st Canadian, 5th UK The Voodoo MAD: Signet 3rd UK The Greasy MAD: Signet 3rd UK Three Ring MAD: Signet 1st Canadian, 3rd UK The MAD Sampler: Signet 1st UK A MAD World, World, World World: Signet 1st UK Raving MAD: Signet 1st UK Boiling MAD: Signet 1st UK The Questionable MAD: Signet 1st UK Polyunsaturated MAD: 1st Canadian Hooked on MAD: 1st UK MAD for Kicks: 3rd UK. Sergio Aragones's MAD Marginals!: UK 2nd printing Dave Berg Looks, Listens, & Laughs: Purple Lettering UK 2nd printing A MAD Guide to Leisure Time: UK MAD Around the World: Blue/White Lettering UK 2nd printing Get Stuffed with MAD: UK 2nd printing MAD's Bizarre Bazaar: UK 3rd printing MAD's Don Martin Grinds Ahead: UK The MAD Worry Book: Red Cover with Bluish Green/White Lettering UK 3rd printing MAD Clobbers the Classics: UK MAD as a Hatter: UK The Sound of MAD: UK A MAD Guide to Self-Improvement: UK A MAD Guide to Fraud and Deception: UK The MAD Book of Revenge: UK.