Cultural Impact
When Harvey Kurtzman began editing Mad in 1952, his intention was simply to satirize comic book genres. He had no idea that his comic book was destined to become a publishing phenomenon that would reach a circulation of 2,132,655 by 1974, be reprinted in slick, full-color hardcover slipcased editions and transform the culture of the 20th Century. The cultural significance of Kurtzman and his creation were noted by the Pulitzer Prize-winning cartoonist Art Spiegelman:
- Kurtzman's Mad held a mirror up to American society, exposing the hypocrisies and distortions of mass media with jazzy grace and elegance. He's our first post-modern humorist, laying the groundwork for such contemporary humor and satire as Saturday Night Live, Monty Python and Naked Gun.
Only three years after it began, Mad was catalogued in Harvard's Houghton Library.
Read more about this topic: List Of Mad Issues
Famous quotes containing the words cultural and/or impact:
“All cultural change reduces itself to a difference of categories. All revolutions, whether in the sciences or world history, occur merely because spirit has changed its categories in order to understand and examine what belongs to it, in order to possess and grasp itself in a truer, deeper, more intimate and unified manner.”
—Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770–1831)
“Television does not dominate or insist, as movies do. It is not sensational, but taken for granted. Insistence would destroy it, for its message is so dire that it relies on being the background drone that counters silence. For most of us, it is something turned on and off as we would the light. It is a service, not a luxury or a thing of choice.”
—David Thomson, U.S. film historian. America in the Dark: The Impact of Hollywood Films on American Culture, ch. 8, William Morrow (1977)