cowboy story with an educational health message about syphilis. Kurtzman continued to receive work from EC. In late 1950 Kurtzman began writing and editing the adventure comic book Two-Fisted Tales for EC; the war title Frontline Combat followed in mid-1951. The stories had a degree of realism not yet seen in American comics. Kurtzman rejected the idealization of war that had swept the US since World War II. He spent days or weeks researching story details, in the New York Public Library or interviewing and corresponding with GIs. Kurtzman was given a great deal of artistic freedom by Gaines, but was himself a strict taskmaster. He insisted that the artists who drew his stories not deviate from his layouts. The artists generally respected Kurtzman's wishes out of respect for his creative authority, but some, such as Bernie Krigstein and Dan Barry, felt their own artistic autonomy impinged upon. Those who worked for EC received payment based on output. Kurtzman's laborious working methods meant he was much less prolific than fellow EC writer-editor Al Feldstein, and Kurtzman felt financially under-appreciated for the amount of effort he poured into his work. He was burdened with a mortgage and a family. He also detested the horror content of the books Feldstein produced and which outsold his own work. He believed these stories had the same sort of influence on children that the chauvinism of other war comics had and which he believed he worked hard against in his own work. Mad comic book (1952–55) "Humor in a Jugular Vein" —Mads subtitle during its run as a comic book Remembering Kurtzman's Hey Look! humor strips, Gaines proposed a humor comic book to increase Kurtzman's income, as he believed such a title would take far less time and effort to research. It was named Mad, a title Kurtzman remembered as his own idea, while Gaines recalled EC's Mad Mag as a suggestion of his own or Feldstein's. The first issue appeared in August 1952, cover-dated October–November. The stories in Mad targeted what Kurtzman saw as fundamental untruths in the subjects parodied, inspired by the irreverent humor found in contemporary college humor magazines; other precedents were in satirical cartoon magazines such as Judge and Ballyhoo, the latter of which was so popular for its spoofing of advertisements that advertisers paid for them. Kurtzman developed stories in the same incremental way he had for the war stories,