Pageant (magazine) - Link With Mad

Link With Mad

Pageant indirectly figures into the history of Harvey Kurtzman's Mad, triggering the switch of Mad from a comic book to a magazine. In the early 1950s, Pageant did an article about the comic book Mad, illustrating it with an original double-page cartoon showing a parade of Mad characters. The drawing was created especially for Pageant by Kurtzman and Will Elder. Not long after that, Kurtzman received an offer to edit Pageant. Mad publisher Bill Gaines, in an interview with Steve Ringgenberg, explained what happened next:

I changed it because Harvey Kurtzman, my then editor, got a very lucrative offer from... Pageant magazine, and he had, prior to that time, evinced an interest in changing Mad into a magazine. At the time, I didn’t think I wanted to because I didn’t know anything about publishing magazines. I was a comics publisher, but remembering this interest, when he got this offer, I countered his offer by saying I would allow him to change Mad into a magazine, which proved to be a very lucky step for me. But that’s why it was changed. It was not changed to avoid the Code. Now, as a result of this, it did avoid the Code, but that’s not why I did it. If Harvey had not gotten that offer from Pageant, Mad probably never would have changed format.

Shirley Bonne, an actress who appeared in the CBS comedy series My Sister Eileen (1960–61), appeared twice on the Pageant cover in the mid-1950s.