Sunday Mailbag: MAD Bold Text Origin?

Q: What was the origin of the bold words in the dialogues of movies and TV shows in MAD?

A: You mean when certain words in the word balloons in a MAD movie or TV parody are done in bold text like this?:

That’s a great question. In fact it’s such a hard question I don’t know the answer. So I asked the one guy I thought might know the answer, MAD‘s art director Emeritus Sam Viviano. Turns out he doesn’t know either, but he did have a lot of illuminating information on that particular MAD tradition:

Okay, here’s my take on the question about bolding in MAD’s continuity balloons.

I can’t speak to the history of it, or when it was first done, and unlike the Good Old Days, I can’t simply go into the bound volumes to do a little research. My hunch, however, is that it likely goes back to the very earliest days of Kurtzman’s half-dozen issues of the magazine. If my memory serves, Harvey used plenty of copy-laden balloons from the beginning, and I’m pretty sure he bolded in ways similar to how (and why) we did it when I was art director.

I of course inherited putting together the movie and TV spoofs from Lenny Brenner, so I simply followed his lead and saw no reason to do otherwise. Even when I first started illustrating continuities (MAD #253, “Ghost-Dusters”), I realized that the bolding served two purposes. Firstly, it helped readers (particularly the bright 12-year-olds we always thought of as MAD’s “typical” audience) to “hear” the dialog in their heads, with the bold words serving as stress indicators. One can think of the copy in the balloons as a kind of poetry, and the bolding helps get the rhythm and meter pinned down.

More importantly — at least to me as the art director — the bold words had a visual purpose. Without them, the balloons would be filled with a bunch of type that was uniformly gray, which would be boring-looking and uninviting. Bolding a random number of words within a given balloon would give that balloon texture and sparkle, and, ultimately, make it easier to read. Obviously, for this visual purpose, the bolding could be literally random, but that would make the balloon more, rather than less, easy to read. So there needed to be an awareness of how the bolding would affect the pace and rhythm of the dialog.

In the old days, the bolds were indicated by the editor responsible for preparing the script. You may have heard Feldstein’s claim that “every word in MAD went through his typewriter.” In essence, what he meant was that he would do the final copy-casting, making sure there were not too many characters in a line and indicating which words were bolded. When I came aboard, most of that responsibility shifted to the art department (i.e., me). Once we started fitting copy in page layout programs like QuarkExpress and later Adobe InDesign, it was easier for me to decide which words should be emphasized. (To be honest, I sort of wrenched this job from the editorial department because I often disagreed with their choices of which words should be bolded. They were fine with that, because, well, y’know — less work for them!)

So that’s the story. Not sure if it exactly answers your correspondent’s question, but at least it sheds some light on the how and why.

Thanks for asking, “Tom from Burnsville”!

Your buddy, 
The Answer Man

– Sam Viviano, MAD’s Art Director Emeritus

Thanks, Sam! And thanks to David Lubin from Tampa Fl for asking in the first place! If you have a question you want answered about cartooning, illustration, MAD Magazine, caricature or similar, e-mail me and I’ll try and answer it here, or failing that I’ll ask Sam!