"The magazine had begun when Harvey Kurtzman, a cartoonist who had been interviewing Korean War veterans for combat comic books, came down with jaundice and decided to create something that he could write from his sickbed. Mr. Gaines gave him the go-ahead. But to children of the air-raid shelter generation, the first primary-school group taught to "duck and cover" -- hide under school desks and shield their faces in case of the white-hot flash of an atomic bomb -- Mad quickly became an essential part of growing up. Month after month, in its relentlessly good-natured way, Mad told them that everything was askew. "It's no accident that it came along when it did, in the 50's," said Tony Hiss, a staff writer at The New Yorker. "That's when TV was beginning to take hold, and one of its unexpected side effects was a new kind of bunkum-detector. All those commercials gave you an awareness that you were being conned and allowed you to see through the hype.""