My first impression of Al Feldstein was that he looked like an Eastern rube who had been taken for the proverbial ride at a Western-wear emporium.
When I met him in the spring of 1991, this son of Brooklyn was wearing a fringed leather vest, a bolo tie with vaguely Navajo touches, and blue jeans cinched with a silver belt buckle roughly the size of a serving tray. The look was in keeping with the decor of Feldstein's house, a log home on steroids decorated in high cowboy style.
We were both new arrivals in Wyoming after sojourns in the Manhattan magazine world. Mine consisted of four unpaid months as an intern. Feldstein's career had lasted four decades, made him passably rich, and continues to shape American culture.
Feldstein, who died Tuesday at 88, served for almost 30 years as the editor of Mad Magazine as it rose from punk upstart to satiric powerhouse. For the baby boom, particularly its adolescent males, Mad was forbidden fruit you might be able to sneak into your mother's supermarket cart. Alternately anarchic and clever, it chose its targets across the social spectrum — from Hollywood flummery to political double talk. It countered the culture and the counterculture alike.
Feldstein, an artist by vocation, met publisher William Gaines in 1948, just after the death of Gaines' father left him in control of a threadbare publishing company called Educational Comics, or EC.
They churned out superhero rip-offs, including a Wonder Woman wannabe called Moon Girl. Feldstein and Gaines would carpool to work from Brooklyn and "go to roller derby games together." Deciding to start their own trend, they changed the company's name to Entertaining Comics and began cranking out high-octane war, sci-fi and horror comics like Two-Fisted Tales, Weird Fantasy and the legendary Tales from the Crypt.
In a nation just emerging from the horrors of World War II, EC's battering-ram storytelling and wildly energetic artwork rose to the top. Feldstein was producing up to four stories a week after plotting sessions with Gaines at the company's offices in Little Italy. "We were surrounded by the mafia and great spaghetti restaurants," Feldstein said.
That wasn't all EC and the mafia had in common: In 1954, Congress' anti-crime Kefauver Commission set up a subsidiary panel to investigate juvenile delinquency. Its star witness was a researcher named Frederic Wertham, whose treatise "Seduction of the Innocent" sniffed out the corrupting subtexts — usually gay, sometimes fascist — that he claimed was strewn like land mines across the comic book field.
Feldstein was allowed to testify in a closed session, but Gaines was questioned in public. "They trapped him," Feldstein recalled. "They had a blow-up of a cover showing a scalp and the top of a head, and you could tell that it had been cut off. And they laid into him. ... He said, 'But this is restrained — we could have shown the dripping gore and such."
Fearing government regulation, the industry crafted the puritanical Comics Code Authority, effectively killing EC's brand. "No comic magazine," it decreed, "shall use the word horror or terror in its title."
"We had to start turning out innocuous stories to get through the Code — knights, fighter aces, piracy," Feldstein said.
The company's lifeboat turned out to be Mad, which Feldstein took over from its mad-genius founder Harvey Kurtzman in 1956.
No one can say what the world would look like without Mad, but bear in mind that one of its earliest fans was Terry Gilliam, who would become the lone American member of Monty Python. A Mad-less alternative universe might have National Lampoon, "Saturday Night Live," "The Simpsons" and The Onion, but they wouldn't be quite the same. And they almost certainly wouldn't be as funny.
Feldstein, who had lost so much at the hands of politicians, got the last laugh as Mad's circulation crested above 2 million during the era of Vietnam and Watergate.
"We got across the message that truth is not what you read, and not what you're told by the people in power," he said. " ... We were merely reaffirming what people were feeling, but didn't have the courage to express because they felt all alone."
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