This is out “in the wild” on the interwebby and will be in MAD #499: You have to feel a little sorry for the guy, but how stupid can you be? Doesn’t he have any handlers or advisers around to tell him taking hits off bongs at parties where everyone has a camera in their cell phone is not going to be kept a secret? READ MORE
If there was ever any doubt that Time Warner’s financial struggles were a key factor in MAD‘s switching to quarterly publication and laying off several (more) staffers, this article from My Way News should squash it: Time Warner swings to 4Q loss on hefty writedown TW lost $16.03 billion in the last quarter of 2008. Knowing all that was going down, is it any wonder TW sold all the remaining and most valuable original MAD cover artwork, and then cut publication and personnel? It was a company wide bloodletting, and althogh recent drops in circulation didn’t help even if MAD was still selling over 200,000… READ MORE
In the wake of the “MAD going quarterly” announcement, one common response I’ve read is that MAD didn’t make any real attempts to create an internet presence to compliment (supplement?) it’s printed incarnation, and that helped lead to the circulation difficulties. I’m not sure how anyone works out that offering MAD content for free on the internet would somehow equate to getting people to pay for content in a magazine, but certainly in terms of introducing MAD to new young readers who spend most of their time on the internet, it makes some sense. Almost all magazines these days have websites with some kind of… READ MORE
Q: When I was a kid, Mad was all in black and white.¬¨‚Ć All your jobs are in color.¬¨‚Ć Do you feel this affects how you work compared to when Mad artists didn’t have to worry about coloring?¬¨‚Ć Are there things in the sketching and inking process you have to sacrifice because of the coloring phase? A: As I have said here in the past, I will always feel a little like I missed out on the “good old days” having not been a part of the old black and white MAD. That isn’t exactly accurate, as I technically did appear in the last issue… READ MORE
Funny how life works. Last week DC Comics and Time Warner announced that MAD will be going from a monthly to a quarterly publication, presumably due to dropping circulation amid the increasing costs and difficulties of a badly ailing magazine marketplace. Almost simultaneously, MAD began getting the most attention I’ve seen it receive in a long time from the media and on the internet from its latest issue, cover pictured above. The inside of the issue featured “The First 100 Minutes of the Obama Presidency” as well as the feature I did the art for and previously mentioned, “MAD Exposes Who’s Thinking What at the… READ MORE
There’s been a lot of discussion over “teh interweb” the last few days about DC Comic’s announcement that MAD will be switching to a quarterly as of issue #500 in April. I’ve read a lot of lamenting about “the good old days” and some expected responses about how it’s what MAD deserves because its “content has gone downhill” in the last 5, 10, 15, 20 years…. blah, blah, blah. Some people are determined to blame the content of MAD for the current state of the magazine. Anybody who honestly thinks the problems MAD has had with its circulation and readership is a result of its… READ MORE
The rumors of MAD‘s demise after issue #500 were greatly exaggerated… but not that greatly. Newsarama reports today that DC has announced MAD will become a quarterly publication following issue #500, which will be on the stands in April. Issue 501 will be released in August, with issue 502 in November and so on. The magazine will go from 48 pages to 56. More on Publisher’s Beat. DC also announced that both MAD Kids and MAD Classics will be discontinued. Three full time MAD staffers are also being laid off, along with a number of other DC staff members. Obviously this is very sad news.… READ MORE
I’m still not exactly sure how it happened, but somewhere along the line I ended up establishing the reputation of being able to “do a crowd scene”. I am sure my art director at MAD Magazine, Sam Viviano, can sympathize. He is well known for his work with crowd scenes, and all that implies. Simply put, it means you end up getting a lot of jobs doing complicated crowd scenes because… well…. you CAN. In the world of freelancing there is never anything wrong with getting jobs. However when a lot of jobs end up being time consuming crowd scenes, you sometimes just wish for… READ MORE
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