In all the years I’ve been reading Mad Magazine, the letters “ind” always appear after the “M” in Mad. What do these letters mean?
M ind
(as in Mad Mind)
Independent, pehaps? Something to do with not having to follow the Comic Book Code about what can and cannot be in a comic book?
IIRC, MAD magazine started as a comic book entitled “Tales to Drive You MAD” and was in essence a comic book. They changed the format and size of the publication to escape the restrictions.
(If you have a chance, find a copy of the code - developed in the 1950s and very scary: if I remember correctly, comic books cannot show characters smoking, divorced people in a positive manner, violence, and a whole lotta other restrictions. A local science-fiction book store had the code as part of a display on censorship, and some of it seems to be quite out-of-date. Hence the proliferation of ‘graphic novels’ as opposed to super-hero comic books)
Original comic code: http://www.dereksantos.com/comicpage/code.html. Mad might have run into these parts:
Thanks smackfu - I didn’t know where I could find that.
Okay, I made up the smoking bit.
I heard the definitive answer to this question once, I think it’s simply the distributor or something.
I’m pretty sure it doesn’t have anything to do with the COmic Book Code.
Mad was distributed for many years by the Independent News Company (starting in 1956). I believe magazines of the time did indicate their distributor on the covers (probably so that newstands would know where to return the covers to). Usually this mark was unobtrusive, but Gaines probably liked the placement near the M for “mind.”
This was the answer I got from a “Mad” website I found.
Another sterling example of why you can’t trust everything you read on the Internet.
The way you showed something was under copyright was to say “Copyright 1956 by William M. Gaines.” The law was very specific about the form – You needed the word “copyright” (or © – © was not allowed), the date, and the name of the copyright holder.
The “indica” is the word given to the name of the page or text with all the copyright information, not the copyright itself.