One reader dug up a 1909 German calendar bearing a version of the inane smiling face.Īs it turned out, variations on Neuman’s face could be traced back decades before Kurtzman first stumbled on that first postcard. The kid was used in 1915 to advertise a patent medicine he was a newspaperman named Old Jack he was taken from a biology textbook as an example of a person who lacked iodine he was a testimonial on advertisements for painless dentistry he was originated by comedian Garry Moore he was a greeting-card alcoholic named Hooey McManus he was a Siamese boy named Watmi Worri. Soon enough, submissions started pouring in. To fight the lawsuit, the magazine’s editors put out a call to their readers to help track down Neuman’s origins. That changed in 1965, when a Vermont woman named Helen Pratt Stuff filed a lawsuit against MAD, claiming that her husband, Harry Stuff, had invented and copyrighted the character, known as “The Original Optimist” in 1914, Sweet writes. The inspiration for Neuman’s famous face was clearly out there in the world, but MAD’s editors didn’t have a clue where the original postcard came from. The mystery of that first postcard remained, however. A veteran commercial illustrator, Mingo was tasked with painting Neuman for his first cover appearance on MAD, where he was drawn as a write-in presidential candidate, once again sporting his famous tagline. Neuman’s most famous incarnation was originally the work of an illustrator named Norman Mingo. “It was a kid that didn’t have a care in the world, except mischief,” Kurtzman said, according to Frank Jacobs, author of Totally Mad: 60 Years of Humor, Satire, Stupidity and Stupidity. At that point he didn’t have a name: he was just, as Kurtzman later called him, a “bumpkin portrait,” “part leering wiseacre, part happy-go-lucky kid.” The postcard featured an early version of Neuman’s famous mug, captioned “Me Worry?” Soon after, Kurtzman began sprinkling miniature versions of the drawing throughout MAD’s margins, usually paired with some iteration of that original caption, Sam Sweet writes for the Paris Review. But while MAD might have made the fictional character an icon, his origins remained murky for many years.Īs the story goes, Neuman’s appearance was inspired by an illustrated postcard spotted by MAD’s founder Harvey Kurtzman in the early 1950s. Ever since the big-eared redhead first graced the satirical magazine’s cover in December 1956, Neuman has become synonymous with MAD, appearing on almost every cover since. There is no image more evocative of MAD magazine than the grinning, gap-toothed, freckled face of its mascot, Alfred E.
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