and his layouts were followed faithfully by the artists who drew them—most frequently, Will Elder, Jack Davis, and Wally Wood. The first issue contained four stories, each a parody of a different comic-book genre: horror, science fiction, crime, and Westerns. These general parodies soon gave way to parodies of targeted subjects—Tarzan was the first such parody with "Melvin!" in the second issue. The first three issues struggled—they did not sell enough of their 350,000-copy print runs to break even, and lost thousands of dollars for EC. In the fourth issue appeared the Wally Wood-drawn "Superduperman", a parody of Superman and Captain Marvel, and the copyright infringement lawsuit that National Periodicals had recently brought against Fawcett Comics. The fourth issue quickly sold out—Mad had found its audience. The sixth issue featured a parody of Ernest Thayer's 1888 poem "Casey at the Bat". The text of the poem was unaltered; the humor lay in Davis's over-literal illustrations. Other parodies in this style followed, targeting such poems as "The Face upon the Barroom Floor" (#10), "Paul Revere's Ride" (#20), "The Raven" (#9), and "The Wreck of the Hesperus" (#16). A parody of the comic strip Bringing Up Father in the seventeenth issue draws attention to societal tolerance of domestic violence. The pages alternate between the strip's cartoon style and realistically drawn ones—The Jiggs character, after his wife assaults him with crockery in a humorous cartoon sequence, emerges abraised in the next realistic panel. This style of parodying specific targets became a staple of Mad. Interest in war comics flagged with the end of the Korean War. Gaines canceled Two-Fisted Tales and Frontline Combat in 1954 so Kurtzman could dedicate himself the more profitable Mad, which became EC's first monthly title with issue #10 (April 1954). At the time Mad was shipping 750,000 copies per issue, which was double the sales of EC's horror titles. Numerous Mad imitators soon appeared from other publishers. The first was Whack, a 3-D comic book by Joe Kubert and Norman Maurer whose first issue appeared in October 1953. Numerous Mad-alike series followed, which such titles as Crazy, From Here to Insanity, Madhouse, and Unsane! EC produced a Mad imitator itself with the Feldstein-edited Panic, which Mad advertised in its ninth issue. Feldstein took the imitation so far as to mimic Kurtzman's "Kurtz"-plus-stick man signature with a "Feld"-plus-beer stein signature. Feldstein used the same pool of EC artists as