Harvey Kurtzman and Hugh Hefner were the two towering figures of 1950s culture who showed how idiosyncratic personal vision innovate even in an era of corporatized modern mass media. The best evidence of this is the abject failure of other publishers to imitate their success, at least in their first decade. Kurtzman’s MAD and Hef’s Playboy were singular efforts that made the many knock-offs seem like crude and exploitive misunderstandings of what these geniuses had wrought.