Mad Magazine artist co-founded The Worldwide Church of God.
- Mad magazine illustrator and comic artist Basil Wolverton co-founded The Worldwide Church of God*, when in 1946, as an Elder for the fledgling cult, he signed the Californian corporation papers for the then named ‘Radio Church of God’. In 1956, Wolverton illustrated the horror of the End Time in a booklet produced by Herbert W. Armstrong called 1975 in Prophecy, in which Armstrong wrote of the coming apocalypse. 1975 in Prophecy was used as a major recruiting tool by the cult, along with The Plain Truth, an ironically named FREE magazine available in news-agencies and airport outlets around the world.
* The Worldwide Church of God was a doomsday (or ‘End Time’) cult religion started by Herbert W. Armstrong in 1933. After his death in 1986, the cult lasted almost ten years before splinter groups—many of which are still functioning today—began to form in countries around the world.
My novel, The Last Great Day, is an autobiographical account of my family’s early life in that cult.
