Regardless of age or background, most people are well aware of Mad Magazine, when thinking of the magazine, its mascot Alfred E. Neuman is likely the first image to come to mind. At this point, the face is synonymous with the long-running humor magazine, but this wasn’t always the case, and the origin of the face remained a hotly debated mystery for over a century. Regardless of origin, the mischievous nature of the face and his irreverent slogan of “Me Worry?” appealed to Mad‘s off-the-wall style and helped define the magazine’s place in the public’s eye as one of the greatest humor magazines of all time.
Originally founded in 1952 as a humor comic by publisher EC Comics (also known for producing the iconic horror comic Tales from the Crypt), the iconic Mad featured comics and gags mostly written by its co-founder Harvey Kurtzman during his 28 issue tenure as editor. After 23 issues of Mad as a comic, Kurtzman pushed to have Mad released as a slick magazine, and despite higher production costs, the gamble was a success. Yet only five issues after the newly relaunched Mad Magazine was released, and after creating the only EC title to have survived the aftermath of the creation of the Comics Code Authority, Kurtzman left due to a business disagreement with Gaines. Kurtzman took most of Mad‘s artists with him ensuring the magazine would change after his departure, but not before leaving one final mark that would stick with the magazine forever.
The Face That Sold a Thousand Postcards
In 1975, Kurtzman wrote a piece for the New York Times titled “The Face Is Familiar Have We Met?” in which he recalled the origin of Alfred E Neuman’s adoption into the Mad family, writing:
“The face first came to my attention when I was doing the comic book Mad for publisher William Gaines in the middle fifties… We were working with Ballantine paperback books on the first of a series of Mad reprint collections… I noticed on the Ballantine Book bulletin board a postcard with this face… The face was not unfamiliar. I associated it with the funny‐picture postcards in Times Square penny arcades and tourist traps, this one with the caption “What, Me Worry?” under the bumpkin portrait… So I pocketed the card and rushed back to the workshop where I inserted the “What, Me Worry?” face on and in subsequent issues of Mad Magazine.
With the relaunch of Mad as a magazine, Kurtzman created a border drawn by Bill Elder which featured the face with the expression “What? Me Worry?” in the top center of the magazine above the title. This would be Alfred E. Neuman’s first Mad cover appearance, albeit a small one. The postcard Kurtzman acquired from Ballentine would be used as the basis for the first licensed Mad prints, with Bill Elder adding a new typeface to the image. The print was advertised on the inside back page of Mad #27, and until Norman Mingo famously painted him for the cover of Mad #30, was the last prototype for the Alfred E. Neuman readers know today.
A Face Gets a Name
Kurtzman also recalled the origin of how the name Alfred E. Neuman became associated with the face and his research into the face’s beginnings, going on to write in his NYT piece:
“Alfred E. was borrowed from Hollywood by way of the old, old Henry Morgan show. Alfred Newman (the late) was in reality a movie‐music man whose credits were legion on the silver screen. Morgan would use the name for various innocuous characters that passed through his show, and I did in Mad, after Morgan’s fashion. And even though the face was, and ever would be, to me, a What, Me Worry? kid, our fan mail insisted on calling him Melvin Cowznofski and Alfred E. Neuman… The What, Me Worry? kid was permanently baptized Alfred Neuman by Albert Feldstein, the editor who came after me. So that’s the story, once and for all. Don’t ask me any more.”
Interestingly, this wasn’t the first time the name Al was associated with the face. Initially appearing in the May 25, 1927 edition of The Charlotte Observer, the face appeared in a joke letter column regarding a boy who, due to amnesia, lost his name. He was referred to as “The Nameless Wonder” until he became a regular sports column character under the name Ath-a-letic Al “The Man With The Left-Handed Brain” in the January 25, 1931 Sunday edition, where he was known by readers until the character was discontinued in 1944.
Crowd-Sourced Research
Kurtzman also talked about Mad’s initial search into the face’s origins by penning an open-ended plea for information, recalling:
“In our letters page we asked the readers for whatever source information they might have. The answers were astonishing. The face dated back to the 19th century. It was supposed to have been used for selling patent medicine, shoes and soft drinks… and was rendered in dozens of slight to grossly altered variations. But the answer I have always liked to believe was that the face came from an old high school biology text— an example of a person who lacked iodine.”
In an interview with CBC in 1977, Mad Magazine publisher and co-founder Bill Gaines recalled what he was able to discover about the origin of Alfred E. Neuman saying
“There are a lot of theories… The truth of the matter is he was created in the 1890s, and the earliest use we’ve found of him was as an advertisement for a painless dentist in Topeka, Kansas, and the guy’s name was Painless Romaine, and he had a picture of Alfred with the tooth missing and the legend was “it didn’t hurt a bit.” And really that was the earliest we’ve ever found… Alfred’s picture with “What Me Worry?” under it had been sold when I was a little kid. We just kind of adopted him.”
Mad‘s crowd-sourced search for answers was actually the 3rd attempt by a publication to track down the face’s origins. The North Carolina weekly publication The State issued a plea for information regarding the face in its Sept 14, 1935 issue. The issue featured the face on the cover christened “Athaletic Al” after The Charlotte Observer character, with an interior article asking if anyone knew if the face had an older name than the one The Charlotte Observer had used, along with an art contest soliciting drawings of the face. The face appeared again on the Dec 31, 1938 issue due to popular demand, but no answers were gained as to the face’s origins.
The over one-hundred-year-old mystery caught the attention of a lawyer named Peter Jensen Brown who in 2013 started a blog called The Real Alfred E. dedicated to tracking down the origins of Alfred E Neuman. Brown was able to trace the new earliest appearance of Alfred E. Neuman to advertisements for a play released on September 17, 1894, called The New Boy. The ads featured a tagline that somewhat echo Neuman’s catchphrase: “What’s the good of anything? Nothing!” The catchphrase of the show could also be the origin of the early 1910s version of “whatever man”, which was “I should worry”. “I should worry” in turn is the likely original version of “What, Me Worry?” so in many ways, The New Boy could very well be the true source of Alfred E. Neuman and his slogan. Due to photos of one of the later actors to star in the lead role, it’s likely the illustration was based on the appearance of the lead character, leading Brown to believe the origin of Alfred E. Neuman is in fact The New Boy.
With a mystery dating back over a century, there are many other possible early inspirations behind even The New Boy poster, including illustrations of Puck, the god of mischief as depicted in Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Whatever the case may be, the face has always been associated with irreverence, mischief, and farce, so it’s only appropriate that it would find itself the mascot of a magazine dedicated to those luny principles. Whether a prankster deity or an early meme, Alfred E. Neuman‘s identity is now forever cemented with Mad Magazine.
