April 1954. High spring of the season of the toad, when Senator Joseph McCarthy of Wisconsin was still terrifying communists, fellow travellers and anyone to the left of President Eisenhower – and just a few years after his colleague Estes Kefauver had quizzed mobster Frank Costello on national television – America’s lawmakers aimed their inquisitorial eyes at a fresh agent of un-American activity: comic books.

The star turn once again belonged to Kefauver – a warm-up, perhaps, for the Tennessee Democrat’s run for the vice presidency two years later. This time, instead of barbecuing decadent State Department bureaucrats like Alger Hiss or colourful businessmen like Tony ‘Joe Batters’ Accardo and Jake ‘Greasy Thumb’ Guzik, senators grilled William Gaines, publisher of Entertaining Comics, whose titles included Tales from the Crypt, The Vault of Horror and a relatively new humour comic named MAD:

Kefauver: Here is your May 22 issue. This seems to be a man with a bloody ax holding a woman’s head up which has been severed from her body. Do you think that is in good taste?

Gaines: Yes, sir; I do, for the cover of a horror comic. A cover