Mr. Gaines had inherited a faltering comic-book empire from his father, who favored picture stories from the Bible, in the late 1940's and turned it into a huge success with his own blood-and-guts formula. By 1954, with McCarthyism at its peak, that formula was under attack. The Hartford Courant protested "the filthy stream that flows from the gold-plated sewers of New York," and the Senate Subcommittee to Investigate Juvenile Delinquency held hearings into charges that comics led to moral decay.

Maria Reidelbach wrote in "Completely Mad: A History of the Comic Book and the Magazine" (1991) that Mr. Gaines volunteered to testify. "The truth is that delinquency is the product of the real environment in which the child lives and not of the fiction he reads," he said.

Under questioning, he defended what he published as being in good taste. Senator Estes Kefauver asked if a cover showing an ax-wielding man holding a decapitated human head met that standard. Mr. Gaines replied that a cover would be in bad taste if the man had been "holding the head a little higher so the neck would show with the blood dripping from it." But even Mr. Gaines had his limits. He had rejected the artist's first design as too gory.

A few months later, bloodthirsty goings-on were banned under the Comics Code Authority, modeled on motion-picture production rules. But Mr. Gaines suspended publicaton of his horror comics, a decision that eventually drove him Mad. 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."

Alfred E. Neuman, who has been on almost every Mad cover since the mid-1950's, was a composite of characters from the early issues: one whose name was a takeoff on the Hollywood composer Alfred Newman, another the unnamed "What, me worry?" boy. When Al Feldstein took over as editor, Mr. Jacobs said, "he put the two together."