Many moons ago, in my youth, I was an avid reader of Mad Magazine. In those
days, the word “MAD” on the cover of the mag was filled with little figures
of people, doing various humorous things. But there was always one guy on
the rightmost leg of the “M”, pointing to the right of that letter to the
much smaller letters “ind.” I never could figure out what the “ind” meant.
Now my son reads Mad, and sure enough, the “ind” remains.
I’m sure this will be an easy one for you folks. What do those letters
mean?
Independent News was Mad’s distributor after their original distributor, Leader News, went bankrupt in 1956. (To make matters worse, Gaines owed the printing broker George Doughtery $110,000, and Leader News owed $100K to Gaines.)
(source; The MAD World of William M. Gaines, by Frank Jacobs, about 1973.)
To CC: That “crackers” phrase was actually defined, in a Mad article about art films in the early 60s; according to the article, it means, “It’s crazy to pay off a cop in phoney money!”
