The New Yorker rejected this great same sex marriage cover art by Robert Crumb, so he subsequently declined to do any more work for the magazine. I think Robert Crumb is an unlikely candidate for New Yorker cartoonist, because his illustrations are neither boring nor conservative enough for the average subscriber, but what do you think?

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Take a trip back with this fun PopSci archive gallery of ways to reuse household items and see if you can’t find a way to spruce up your boring old house, or an idea for a fun christmas gift made from your leftover stuff. The kid in the drawing sure looks happy with his abacus made from thread spools, so this article may bring happiness into your life!

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A Livejournal post has an extensive collection of beautiful vintage magazine covers, including many from 19th-century issues of the Italian magazine La Scena Illustrata and the French magazines La Vie Parisienne and Figaro Illustré. Some contain illustrated nudity. The cover shown here is from 1883. Link -via Everlasting Blort

Mad magazine has a place in American pop culture as one of the most successful humor magazines ever published. It’s also great bathroom reading. Here’s a brief history.

BACKGROUND

In 1947 Max Gaines, owner of Educational Comics (which published biblical, scientific, and historical comic books), was killed in a boating accident. He left the business to his 25-year-old son, William, a university student.

The younger Gaines renamed the company Entertainment Comics (EC) and got rid of the stodgy educational stuff. Instead, he started publishing more profitable crime, suspense, and horror comics like Tales from the Crypt, Vault of Horrors, and House of Fear.

THE BIRTH OF MAD

Gaines paid his writers and artists by the page. Most of his employees preferred this-but not Harvey Kurtzman. Kurtzman was a freelancer who worked on Frontline Combat, a true-to-life battle comic that portrayed the negative aspects of war. He enjoyed writing it, but it took so long to research and write that he couldn’t make a living doing it. So he went to Gaines and asked for a raise. Gaines refused, but suggested an alternative-in addition to his current work, Kurtzman could produce a satirical comic, which would be easier and more profitable to write. Kurtzman liked the idea and immediately started creating it.

The first issue of Tales Calculated to Drive You Mad: Humor in a Jugular Vein debuted in August 1952. It was a flop…and so were the next two issues. But Gaines didn’t know it; back then, it took so long to get sales reports that the fourth issue-which featured a Superman spoof called Superduperman-was already in the works before Gaines realized he was losing money. By then, Mad had started to sell.

RED SCARE

Gaines didn’t expect Mad to be as successful as his other comics, but it turned out to be the only one that survived the wave of anti-comic hysteria that swept the country during the McCarthy era.

In 1953, Frederic Wertham, a noted psychologist and self-proclaimed “mental hygienist”, published a book called The Seduction of the Innocents, a scathing attack on the comic book industry. Few comics were left untouched-Wertham denounced Batman and Robin as homosexuals, branded Wonder Woman a lesbian, and claimed that such words as “arghh”, “blam”, “thunk”, and “kapow” were producing a generation of illiterates. The charges were outlandish, but the public believed it; churches across the country even held comic book burnings.

To defend themselves, big comic book publishers established the Comics Code Authority (CCA) to set standards of “decency” for the comic book industry and issue a seal of approval to comics that passed scrutiny. (Among the co-called reforms: only “classic” monsters such as vampires and werewolves could be shown; authority figures such as policemen, judges, and government officials could not be shown in any way that encouraged “disrespect for authority,” and the words “crime”, “horror”, and “weird” were banned from comic book titles.) Magazine distributors would no longer sell comics that didn’t adhere to CCA guidelines.

Gaines refused to submit his work the the CCA, but he couldn’t withstand public pressure. By 1954, only four EC titles were left. Amazingly, Mad was one of them.

MAD LIVES

Gaines knew Mad wouldn’t survive long unless he did something drastic to save it. So rather than fight the CCA, he avoided it: He dropped Mad‘s comic book format and turned it into a full-fledged “slick” magazine. Thus, it was no longer subject to CCA censorship.

The first Mad magazine was published in the summer of 1955. “We really didn’t know how Mad, the slick edition, was going to come out,” one early Mad staffer later recalled, “but the people whop printed it were laughing and getting a big kick out of it, so we said ‘This has got to be good.’”

The first issue sold so many copies that it had to be sent back for a second printing. By 1960, sales hit 1 million copies, and Mad was being read by an estimated 58% of American college students and 43% of high school students.

In 1967, Warner Communications, which owned DC Comics, bought Mad, but it couldn’t affect sales or editorial content: as part of the deal, Warner had to leave Gaines alone. In 1973 sales hit an all-time high of 2.4 million copies; since then they’ve leveled off at 1 million annually in the United States. There are also 12 foreign editions. Gaines died in 1992, but Mad continues to thrive.

WHAT, ME WORRY?

Alfred E. Neuman has been Mad magazine’s mascot for years. But his face and even his “What, me worry?” slogan predate the magazine by 50 years. They were adapted from advertising postcards issued by a turn-of-the-century dentist from Topeka, Kansas, who called himself “Painless Romine”.

(Image source: Kansas State Historical Society)

Mad artists were able to rationalize their plagiarism, according to Harvey Kurtzman, after they discovered that Romaine himself had lifted the drawing from an illustration in a medical textbook showing a boy who had gotten too much iodine in his system.

Kurtzman first dubbed the boy “Melvin Koznowski”. But he was eventually renamed Alfred E. Neuman, after a nerdy fictional character on the “Henry Morgan Radio Show.” Strangely enough, that character had been named after a real-life Alfred Newman, who was the composer and arranger for more than 250 movies, including The Hunchback of Notre Dame and The Grapes of Wrath.

MAD FACTS

*In 1965, Mad magazine was turned into an off-Broadway play called The Mad Show. Notices were sent out to New York theater critics in the form of ransom notes tied to bricks. The show gave performances at 3:00 p.m. and midnight, and sold painted rocks, Ex-Lax, Liquid Drano, and hair cream in the lobby. The play got great reviews from the press and ran two years, with bookings in Los Angeles, Chicago, Boston, and other major cities. It was reportedly a major influence on the creators of “Laugh-In”.

*The Mad Movie, Gaines’ first attempt to adapt Mad for the silver screen, was dumped before production began, and Up The Academy, Mad’s second effort, was so bad that Gaines paid $50,000 to have all references to the magazine edited out of the film. An animated TV series in the early 1970s was pulled before it aired. In the mid-1990s, “Mad TV” debuted on the Fox network.

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The article above is reprinted with permission from Uncle John’s Legendary Lost Bathroom Reader.

This special edition book covers the three “lost” Bathroom Readers – Uncle John’s 5th, 6th and 7th book all in one. The huge (and hugely entertaining) volume covers neat stories like the Strange Fate of the Dodo Bird, the Secrets of Mona Lisa, and more …

Since 1988, the Bathroom Reader Institute had published a series of popular books containing irresistible bits of trivia and obscure yet fascinating facts. Check out their website here: Bathroom Reader Institute

The 26-year-old northern Canadian magazine, Up Here, has published its first swimsuit issue to draw attention to climate change.

Its latest edition, out this week, features 10 swimsuit-clad women posing in threatened northern landscapes such as burnt-out forests and melting icescapes.

Why swimsuits?

"When you want to get attention in a room full of people talking, you tend to yell," writes Tim Querengesser on Up Here’s blog. "So, when we decided to dedicate an entire issue to climate change in the North…we knew we’d have to yell to be heard above the already deafening howl."

Link | Up Here magazine post, where sadly there’s no more details on the swimsuit edition

You see beautiful rooms in catalogs and magazines and you have to wonder about people who would live in such artistic perfection. The blog Catalog Living gives you a glimpse into the life of those who live in those places. It’s not always pretty. The caption to the above picture is:

Elaine was not amused by Gary’s passive-aggressive response to her request to “garnish the cocktails.”

Link -via Metafilter

Unless you’ve been living in a cave, you’ve probably heard that newspaper and magazine sales (and therefore, print ad revenues) are down. To combat that decline, several big magazine publishers have come together on a multimillion-dollar ad campaign to diss the Internet:

The ads press the case that magazines remain an effective advertising medium in the age of the Internet because of the depth and lasting quality of print, compared with the ephemeral nature of much of the Web’s content.

"The Internet is fleeting. Magazines are immersive," says one ad, which is slated to appear in May issues of the participating publications. The first spread features a photo of swimmer Michael Phelps from ESPN The Magazine, with the headline "We surf the Internet. We swim in magazines." [...]

"A lot of us sat back for way too long and listened to all this abuse and said nothing about it," says Jann Wenner, who orchestrated the campaign. "Meanwhile, we sit on top of one of the greatest mediums," adds Mr. Wenner, whose Wenner Media publishes Rolling Stone and US Weekly.

That’s a big mistake because the Interwebs don’t take that sort of thing lying down. Asylum has just penned an open letter to the magazine from the Internet:

However, when you start talking trash about the Internet, you’re throwing down the gauntlet. [...] Everything you can do, we can do better and faster. Plus, we can broadcast it everywhere instantly, while you’re still trying to convince us magazines are as cool as Michael Phelps circa summer ’08.

I love reading magazines, and of course, I love the Interwebs – so when these two favorites start fightin’, I feel a bit conflicted. That and I’m looking forward to more LOLcats!

Check out the full open letter over at Asylum: Link

Ryann Ford, an Austin based architectural and interiors photographer, has created a body of work that is a complete opposite of her usual subject matter of high end homes and modern architecture.

12 Baskets, the magazine of the non-profit homelss organization Mobile Loaves & Fishes, asked Ryann to document the "bedrooms" of the homeless in her city. You’ve never seen the homeless population’s living arrangements photographed from an architectural photographer’s perspective. 

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From the Upcoming ueue, submitted by emmafish.

(More scans at Woot!)

Yes, the glorious days of publishing were characterized by whatever could grab your attention on the cover.  Popular Science, Popular Mechanics, and Modern Mechanix led the way in eye-popping art that seemed all the more plausible because of who was publishing it.  Scientists and mechanics know what they’re talking about, and what would make more sense than those commies developing a scary skiing weapon?  Woot! blog reviews and ponders this and other covers.

Holy crap. How did this get past Quality Control? First off, is this actually supposed to have military applications? I know this was back when Russia was pretty scary to everyone Stateside, but a fire engine red propeller on skis with an infantryman strapped to the front isn’t very stealthy. Imagine a squad of 10 or 20 guys motor-skiing around the Siberian plains wondering why the enemy is always gone at least a half hour before they show up. Suppose they find some bad guys. Do they just park that thing and hop off? It’s a pretty easy marker for a sniper down range. And what the hell happens if a guy lets go of the handles accidentally while he’s moving? I have to assume he turns into an Army guy smoothie.

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If the American Bacon above isn’t for you, then perhaps this is more your alley: a collection of Fourth of July covers of The Saturday Evening Post throughout the decades: Link

Happy Fourth of July, everyone!

This can be in various aspects such as editing, directing, animation and so forth. One that really caught my eye from their 20 clips posted has to be this one which blew my mind with the dazzling use of live projection mapping. The creator himself explains, “This is an experimental film made up of over 35,000 photographs. It combines an innovative mix of stop motion and live projection mapping techniques.”

Hit the link to check out the other 19 neat clips up there. Some of them I’m pretty sure we’ve already seen here on Neatorama!

Smashing Magazine – Link

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From the Upcoming Queue, submitted by Muppetmaker.

This is fantastic: Google Book Search has full copies of Popular Science magazine, dating back to 1872, available for you to read online.

The very first issue, May to October 1872, covers such topics as The Study of Sociology (by Herbert Spencer, no less – he coined the term "survival of the fittest"), The Recent Eclipse of the Sun, Science and Immortality, and so on.

Link – Thanks Philipp Lenssen!