This chapter deals with the idiosyncratic works of two key authors from the Mad magazine generation: Harvey Kurtzman and Jules Feiffer. It addresses more specifically the distinctive satirical styles of both authors, who criticized and reconfigured, from a leftist and Jewish immigrant background, the standard signifiers of American mainstream culture. Although both authors contributed equally to the tradition of American cartooning, their work in the graphic novel field is highly divergent. Kurtzman started at EC in the war comics subgenre, but rapidly turned to humor magazines, before introducing an important stand-alone comics paperback with original material, Harvey Kurtzman’s Jungle Book, whose incongruous humor relied on clever, repetitive panel layouts. Like Kurtzman, Feiffer is adept at transmedial appropriation, but his work, which started under Will Eisner’s tutelage, is less focused on citational humor and both more personal and more political. Instead, Feiffer developed singular forms of graphic narratives targeting conformism. The chapter offers close readings of Kurtzman’s Jungle Book and Feiffer’s noir trilogy: Kill My Mother, Cousin Joseph, and The Ghost Script (all from the 2010s).

Chapter 5 chronicles the national panic against comic books that raged between 1948 and 1955.Led by prominent intellectuals, like Dr. Fredric Wertham and his book Seduction of the Innocent, the movement was marked by comic book burnings across the country, and resulted in congressional hearings designed to put pressure on the comic book industry. The movement did not lead to a change in the law, however, as First Amendment doctrine had progressed to the point that local ordinances were struck down when cases came before courts. Nevertheless, the political pressure led the industry to adopt a “voluntary” code enforced by the Comics Magazine Association of America that, for a time, devastated the comic book industry. Wertham’s scholarship eventually was discredited, and the comic book made a comeback as both an art form and a cultural influence.