When I was a little, I used to go grocery shopping with my mother. While she was inspecting produce, I would escape to the aisle which had the magazines. The magazine I would grab was Mad. I wasn't suppose to be reading it because it wasn't considered very nice. I just couldn't wait to fold the page together at the back of the magazine to make the "new" picture. Do you remember doing that? Well, now you can do it all you want online. Somehow, it takes all the fun out of it. Try it here:
http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2008/03/28/arts/20080330_FOLD_IN_FEATURE.html
I had no idea Alfred E. Neuman had been around for so long. Why does he continue to fascinate us today? No one is quite sure where he came from. It is believed he developed from a comic strip character called The Yellow Kid in the late 1890's. I guess they had no problem with children drinking back then. Yikes!
Here he is in 1908.
In the twenty's, he was given the motto, "What, Me Worry?"
In 1955, he first appeared on Mad magazine. It was in an ad selling rubber masks.
Mad put Alfred on the cover in 1956 as a write-in presidential candidate with the slogan, "You could do worse......and always have."
And Alfred is still going strong today.
Are you kidding? I grew up reading Mad Magazine. It was so funny and we kids all fought over who was going to read it next. It was chock full of all kinds of funny things so you could spend hours pouring over it and keep finding new things. Too bad we don't have more humorous things like this these days. Thanks for a fun memory, Lori!
ReplyDeleteThey still sell mad magazine - my kids love it! we still fold the back pages together to see what happens.
ReplyDeleteI remember going to the convenience store and pulling the magazine off the rack and folding the last page! More times than not the page was already folded. That was fun.
ReplyDeleteeileen
one of my younger brothers love A E Newman..We use to say if he had freckles, he might pass for him...
ReplyDeleteIt's funny how that Nueman kid reminds of so many different people! Did ya'll try the online fold-in that turned into Nixon? Hilarious! I forgot how when you folded the picture, the words below also folded into a caption. People are so creative!
ReplyDeleteMy older brother always bought MAD magazine and then refused to let me read them so I used to sneak into his room and read them when he wasn't around. I loved them.
ReplyDelete