Dec 6, 2025
Dave Berg
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seen from United States
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Dave Berg
Mad Magazine’s Dave Berg
Some of EC Comics and MAD Magazine's brightest talents.
Young Bill Gaines (1922-1992) and Al Feldstein (1925-2014) in the EC Comics office, Wally Wood (1927-1981), Dave Berg (1920-2002), Don Martin (1931-2000) , Harvey Kurtzman (1924-1993) and Jack Davis (1924-2016)
‘Wolf at the door!’
Artist: Dave Berg (c 1953)
AKA: ‘Davy’
MEN IN ACTION #1, April 1952. Art by Dave Berg. This came out while the Korean War was still raging. War comics as a genre, strangely enough, became a big deal during the Korean conflict rather than during World War II. This one's from Atlas, the long-underrated middle period for Martin Goodman and Stan Lee between the Golden Age of Timely's superheroes and the familiar Marvel Age of Comics from 1961 forward. Thanks in part to the efforts of many intrepid scanners, there's a new appreciation of Atlas, particularly its peak years from 1952 to 1957, when they were arguably second only to EC in horror and war comics. Stories like this one by Berg are stunning in their grim bleakness at a time when something more patriotically upbeat might have been expected.
Atlas did publish its share of more juvenile war comics with battle-happy heroes practicing slapstick warfare, while Stan infused numerous stories with the bitter anti-communism you see in some of his early Marvel Age stuff, which possibly comes as a jolt to those familiar with his apparently more liberal attitudes on other fronts, if you assume that hatred of Stalinism indicates political conservatism. But Stan's war comics had room for both the ideology and a realistic attitude toward the actuality of war -- much of which can be credited to writer Hank Chapman, the only Atlas scribe besides Stan, as far as I know, who got to sign his work. In any event, the ongoing rediscovery of Atlas, furthered by the anthologies published by Fantagraphics, highlights the classical short-form graphic storytelling that Stan himself would soon make virtually obsolete, while the war comics make you wonder how much stories like Berg's helped provoke the Comics Code crackdown that left superheroes as almost the medium's only option.
More on Atlas soon.
Dell Comics on sale in May, 1962.
Cover by Charles Schulz interior art by Tony Pocnick writer unknown
One-shot comic by Dave Berg
MAD Artists' Response to an Article (MAD #178, October 1975)
Artists: the Usual Gang of Idiots
Dave Berg
Meet Merton #1