Those who worked for EC received payment based on output. Kurtzman's laborious working methods meant he was less prolific than fellow EC writer and editor Al Feldstein, and Kurtzman felt financially underappreciated for the amount of effort he poured into his work. He was financially burdened with a mortgage and a family. He also detested the horror content of the books Feldstein was producing, and which consistently outsold his own work. He believed these stories had the same sort of influence on children that the chauvinism of war comics which he believed he worked hard against in his own work. Remembering Kurtzman's humor work from the 1940s, Gaines proposed a humor magazine to increase Kurtzman's income, as he believed it would take far less time and effort to research. "Mad" debuted in August 1952, and Kurtzman scripted every story in the first twenty-three issues. The stories in "Mad" targeted what Kurtzman saw as fundamental untruths in the subjects parodied, inspired by the irreverent humor found in college humor magazines. They were developed in the same incremental way Kurtzman had developed for the war stories, and his layouts were followed faithfully by the artists who drew them—most frequently, Will Elder, Jack Davis and Wally Wood.