What, me a symbol of Nazi propaganda?
Mad magazine mascot Alfred E. Neuman was appropriated from earlier sources.
So prolific were pre-Mad uses of the face, that when the magazine was sued for copyright infringement (twice, once based on a 1914 copyright and the other on a 1936 one), its major defense was to show the court that the plaintiffs had copied it from even earlier sources.
In Carl Djerassi’s memory, these earlier sources include Nazi propaganda in Austria in 1938.
=v= Interesting stuff. Maria Reidelbach's Completely MAD, a history of the comic book and magazine, devotes a whole chapter to the many Alfred E. Neuman images that had cropped up long before MAD existed. This book refers to him as "they boy," and none of them have hook noses. To my eyes, the earliest ones (in the U.S., at least) looked to be an ethnic slam against the Irish. No doubt there's a different branch of the evolutionary tree in Europe.
MAD made use of the name "Alfred E. Neuman" in some features, with various spellings, before they assigned it to the image of "the boy." Editor Harvey Kurtzman grew up in Brooklyn in an immigrant Jewish neighborhood, and many in the early days of MAD had similar backgrounds, so the comic and early years of the magazine made use of several Jewish names and a number of Yiddishisms. I suspect that naming "the boy" Neuman was coincidental; I doubt they would've used the image at all if they'd known about the Nazi propaganda.
Posted by Jym on May 1 2005 19:38