![]() ![]() "I should worry" in turn is the likely original version of "What, Me Worry?" so in many ways, The New Boy could very well be the true source of Alfred E. Neuman to advertisements for a play released on September 17, 1894, called The New Boy. The ads featured a tagline that somewhat echo Neuman's catchphrase: "What's the good of anything? Nothing!" The catchphrase of the show could also be the origin of the early 1910s version of "whatever man", which was "I should worry". Brown was able to trace the new earliest appearance of Alfred E. dedicated to tracking down the origins of Alfred E Neuman. The over one-hundred-year-old mystery caught the attention of a lawyer named Peter Jensen Brown who in 2013 started a blog called The Real Alfred E. Submissions to The State's 1935 "Athaletic Al" drawing contest. The face appeared again on the issue due to popular demand, but no answers were gained as to the face's origins. The issue featured the face on the cover christened "Athaletic Al" after The Charlotte Observer character, with an interior article asking if anyone knew if the face had an older name than the one The Charlotte Observer had used, along with an art contest soliciting drawings of the face. Mad's crowd-sourced search for answers was actually the 3rd attempt by a publication to track down the face's origins. The North Carolina weekly publication The State issued a plea for information regarding the face in its Sissue. Alfred's picture with "What Me Worry?" under it had been sold when I was a little kid. The truth of the matter is he was created in the 1890s, and the earliest use we've found of him was as an advertisement for a painless dentist in Topeka, Kansas, and the guy's name was Painless Romaine, and he had a picture of Alfred with the tooth missing and the legend was "it didn't hurt a bit." And really that was the earliest we've ever found. In an interview with CBC in 1977, Mad Magazine publisher and co-founder Bill Gaines recalled what he was able to discover about the origin of Alfred E. The print was advertised on the inside back page of Mad #27, and until Norman Mingo famously painted him for the cover of Mad #30, was the last prototype for the Alfred E. ![]() The postcard Kurtzman acquired from Ballentine would be used as the basis for the first licensed Mad prints, with Bill Elder adding a new typeface to the image. Neuman's first Mad cover appearance, albeit a small one. With the relaunch of Mad as a magazine, Kurtzman created a border drawn by Bill Elder which featured the face with the expression "What? Me Worry?" in the top center of the magazine above the title. I associated it with the funny‐picture postcards in Times Square penny arcades and tourist traps, this one with the caption “What, Me Worry?” under the bumpkin portrait. So I pocketed the card and rushed back to the workshop where I inserted the “What, Me Worry?” face on and in subsequent issues of Mad Magazine. I noticed on the Ballantine Book bulletin board a postcard with this face. We were working with Ballantine paperback books on the first of a series of Mad reprint collections. "The face first came to my attention when I was doing the comic book Mad for publisher William Gaines in the middle fifties. ![]() In 1975, Kurtzman wrote a piece for the New York Times titled "The Face Is Familiar Have We Met?" in which he recalled the origin of Alfred E Neuman's adoption into the Mad family, writing: Spy) The Face That Sold a Thousand Postcards Related: Exclusive Preview: MAD Magazine Mocks Music (With Spy vs. ![]()
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