Almost from the minute the Cincinnati Art Museum announced that What, Me Worry? The Art and Humor of MAD Magazine was on the way; I have been part of a group numbering 2 to 6+ that made and scrapped multiple plans to attend. At last, three of us made it on Friday. We all had Mad Magazine memories. Two of us were almost exactly the same age, with memories from the late 1950s through the 1960s and maybe a little beyond. The third member of the group was some three decades younger with memories correspondingly offset. The exhibit covers Mad from its 1952 beginning, which means we each saw things we remembered, even if we didn’t remember everything.

Of course, one thing that everybody remembers is Alfred E. Neuman. He first appeared in the magazine in 1954 and soon became a near constant presence on the cover. There is definitely a connection with the 1914 “Original Optimist” drawing, but the image goes back even further. The opening “Will worry for food” image is much newer. It is the October 2009 cover, which I don’t believe I had seen previously, but it sure fits what I would expect from Mad in the twenty-first century.

Mad started out as a comic book, then became a magazine with this cover in July 1955. Note that Alfred E. Neuman appears in the banner at the top, although he had not yet been identified by name. Among the changes this brought was the ability to satirize government officials, which was something disallowed by the Comics Code Authority of 1954.

Don Martin was an absolute favorite of mine, and seeing his artwork for the cover of 1962’s Don Martin Steps Out! was a real treat. His “PAY TOLL FIFTY FEET” from the March 1980 magazine back cover is a true classic.

This was the biggest surprise for me, though maybe it should not have been. I know of Frank Frazetta from his outstanding work in fantasy and science fiction, but did not realize that he had ever been connected with Mad. This is one of three back covers he did for the magazine, and he also did one cover. “Early One Morning in the Jungle” was in the October 1966 issue, so it is possibly the first Frank Frazetta piece of art I ever saw.

One of the things Mad Magazine did best was satirizing movies and TV shows. It also had a knack for slipping jokes into comic strips that had nothing to do with the story and which (at least in my case) might not even be caught until the second or third reading. This spoof of “Wonder Woman” is an example of both. Diana Banana (Woman Wonder) and Steve Adore engage in a silhouetted display of affection near signs pointing to “Proving Grounds”, “Inproving Grounds”, “Coffee Grounds”, etc.

A long-running feature that first appeared during my peak Mad infatuation was the fold-in. Presented as the opposite of fold-outs from Playboy and others, fold-ins began appearing in 1964. As I looked over these framed examples, I wondered at the lack of “folded” versions, but was relieved to see a rack of creased pages on the wall. Some of the folding had probably not been all that precise, and certainly wasn’t after a bunch of repeats, but they all worked just fine to reveal the “real” pictures. If you want to do some digital “folding-in” on your own, there are some interactive examples here.

The exhibit is organized in a loose chronological sequence, and I was starting to get concerned about finding something on one of my favorite features. “Spy vs. Spy” came along in 1961, and I was well into the second half of the exhibit before these popped up. It’s pretty fuzzy, but there’s a slightly more readable version of that second image here. Incidentally, small sketches often appeared in the margins of the magazine, and that is sort of mimicked here with sketches on the walls, like the one with both spies in a bomb. Antonio Prohías, a Cuban refugee, originated the strip and drew it until 1987. The first pictured strip is his from March 1983. Peter Kuper picked up the strip full-time in 1997 and switched to color in 2001. The second pictured strip is his from June 2004. That one doesn’t work for me. That’s not in any way a dig on Kuper’s talent. I remember black-and-white drawings of a black character and a white character, each believing they were the good guy, even though it was starkly evident there was no difference between them at all. I suppose that’s still there with colored backgrounds, but it somehow seems less obvious.

What, Me Worry? The Art and Humor of MAD Magazine is here through March 1. It’s even free on Thursday evenings between 5:00 and 8:00..