Early Installment Weirdness / Magazines

• As weird as Bewildering Stories is, its first year was full of deliberate nonsense, like a million word novel written by a random word generator and various short stories published under colourful pseudonyms. That started petering off after issue 40, and the site has been publishing reasonable quality works since issue 60.
• Cosmopolitan started in the late 19th century as a sort of refined yet family-oriented literary/news magazine and had many noted authors of the day writing articles and short stories. Think of TIME, LIFE, The New Yorker and Ladies' Home Journal thrown into a blender....that was Cosmopolitan (or The Cosmopolitan, as it was called). Then in The '60s, it was retooled into the oft-cheesy women's fashion, celebrities and (dubious) sex tips format we know today.
• MAD:
  • For its first 23 issues, it was an EC comic book, published in full color with real ads, though the magazine adopted both some five decades later. Stories in the earliest issues were often only slightly sillier takes on typical EC Comics scenarios, though the focus soon shifted to parodies of popular shows and cultural trends. Also during this timespan, nearly all of the articles were written by Harvey Kurtzman, and art was typically handled by Kurtzman, Will Elder, Wally Wood, John Severin, or Jack Davis. Of these, only Davis would return once the artist pool became more established in The '60s.
  • The first six issues of the magazine format do not feature Alfred E. Neuman on the cover. While both his name and image were used for several issues prior (including the decorative border of said cover art), the two were not permanently matched until the cover of #30.
  • The early issues of the magazine format were very different. The humor was "lighter and softer", the TV/movie satires were less biting (and more likely to deviate from the plot), politics was rarely spoofed, and most notably, they had contributions by famous humorists of the day (Bob & Ray, Danny Kaye, Sid Caesar, Andy Griffith, Stan Freberg, Tom Lehrer, etc.). Some articles were long essays with minimal art, or just wacky illustrations of existing songs or poems. It wasn't until the sixties that MAD gained the format it's most known for and began fostering most of its own talent pool (aka the "Usual Gang of Idiots").
  • Many of the early articles had either no byline, or only one for the artist. Some issues put the contributing artists and writers in the masthead, but did not specify who worked on what. To this day, it's still not known who wrote some of the earlier articles. By The '60s, full bylines became the norm.
  • Don Martin's early work was more Black Comedy, with little of the manic pacing and Written Sound Effects that he would later become known for. The change in tone is likely due to Don "Duck" Edwing coming on board as a frequent ghostwriter of his.
  • Speaking of Duck Edwing, he was exclusively a writer from the 1960s until the early 1980s when he started drawing much of his own material as well.
  • Some of the first Spy vs. Spy comics, including the first two, feature the Black Spy and White Spy foiling each others' schemes without killing or injuring each other.
  • Artist/writer Dave Berg's first few credits were for more "normal" articles, and on a few early occasions, he was only artist or writer. By the early 1960s, he had almost permanently become known entirely for The Lighter Side, on which he was both artist and writer until his 2002 death.
  • The Fold-In was black-and-white from its debut in #86 until issue #119, when it permanently changed to color. Also, artist/writer Al Jaffee experimented with the layout and placement of captions a few times until settling on the standard format. Most notably, the first one is the only one that does not have the outer elements of the existing image create a new image when folded in, and the third one in #88 is the only one to date that folds diagonally instead of "fold in so A meets B".
• It took nearly ten years before Cracked began to spoof movies and TV shows just like rival MAD. The early issues featured shorter and more slapdash articles, including a nearly ten-issue stretch written entirely by Paul Laikin. The first issue is also one of the only ones to have a cover drawn by someone other than John Severin. The talent pool is also markedly different, with some early issues featuring art from Will Elder and Jack Davis (who would return to MAD in The '60s), and then-future MAD talent such as Al Jaffee and Angelo Torres, along with other comic artists of the day such as Joe Maneely, Russ Heath, Carl Burgos, and Syd Shores. Many of the recurring features, such as Nanny Dickering, Hudd & Dini, and Ye Hang-Ups, didn't occur until The '70s.
• Goofus and Gallant (from Highlights for Children) were originally drawn in a Brothers Grimm-esque setting with pointy elf ears. By the mid-1950s they had become human children in a contemporary backdrop, but there've still been many, many Art Shifts since.
• The first three years of MacAddict were far more colorful and playful, with plenty of tongue-in-cheek humor, Running Gags, themed comics, and a garish green and purple motif. They had a stick figure mascot who was used throughout, most notably in their review section. Over time, Cerebus Syndrome set in quite hard. The magazine got a sterile white-and-blue makeover, lost most of the cartoony edges, and was renamed Mac|Life in 2007.
• Going the other way, Disney Adventures was a lot less colorful in its early years — there were fewer comics and the overall tone was more serious.
• Go and look at a back issue of Time from, say, the 1950s. You'll notice the overall format is pretty much the same as it is now, but the articles are much shorter - especially the arts and entertainment features - just as they would be in a newspaper (and, in fact, for the first several decades of its existence, Time billed itself not as a magazine but as a newsmagazine). It also frequently had illustrations instead of photographs on its covers until about the 1980s.
• Heat is one of the best-selling celeb/gossip/beauty/fashion magazines in Britain. However, it originally launched in the late-90s as a more serious, general entertainment-focused magazine, described at the time as a somewhat hipper alternative to the Radio Times. Despite a positive reception, it didn't sell well, and quickly shifted to the present reality/soap-celebrity-focused, female-oriented format.
• FHM was originally a quarterly magazine focusing on men's fashion and lifestyle. It later switched to a monthly release and after realizing covers with scantily clad celebrities on them sold way better the format changed to the lads' mag everyone is familiar with these days.
• Brazilian magazine Mundo Estranho started out as a series of compilations of several articles from another magazine, Super Interessante, before developing its own identity.
• Rolling Stone started out in 1967 in a newspaper format. Over time, the format of the magazine changed so that by the 1980s, it had the glossy magazine format that it has today. The size has also gotten much smaller from when it first started.
• Early on, Billboard magazine was focused on the advertising business, hence its name. It soon grew to focus on all aspects of the entertainment industry, but the popularity of jukeboxes shifted the magazine's focus to music. By the 1940s it began publishing charts that ranked the popularity of singles, helping to codify it as a magazine about the music industry (and creating an Artifact Title in the process).
• In the first issue of Nickelodeon Magazine, Zelda Van Gutters' commentary was virtually nowhere to be found, being limited to the last page of the magazine.
• Wizard: The Comics Magazine first started out as Wizard: The Guide to Comics. The first year or so had iconic artists drawing covers involving various heroes with a wizard's hat and robe or one and the other.

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