MAD Sneak Peek

I believe I’ve mentioned, once or twice here on The MAD Blog, something called the “evergreen drawer” in the MAD offices. The evergreen drawer refers to articles that the staff at MAD keep laid aside for use in an undetermined future issue. For obvious reasons the articles that are put in the evergreen drawer need to be not of a timely nature i.e. their subject matter must be such that they can be run anytime and still remain basically relevant. Hence, “evergreen”.

There are several reasons an article might end up in the evergreen drawer. The most common is that another article is fast tracked due to it’s timely nature and inserted into an issue in place of an article that could be an evergreen drawer job. Sometimes articles might be designated as an evergreen job just because their subject matter makes them a perfect candidate for such. Evergreen drawer jobs are good things to have about, because if a deadline is blown or an article comes in that just didn’t meet the expectations of the editors and needs more work, the ability to grab a finished article with the corresponding number of pages and place it instantly into an issue due for print submission is invaluable. Sometimes articles just get pulled out of the drawer and run just because they need running.

I haven’t had many jobs end up in the evergreen drawer, but the one running in MAD #491 is one of them. I actually did this job back in September of last year, but it got bumped for another article and placed in the evergreen drawer. So, this month it’s emerging from the evergreen drawer and getting run. It’s titled “What’s Being Taught At Other Corporate Colleges”. Here’s a couple of the panels:

I actually like to get these somewhat laid back jobs from MAD now and then… doing the “continuity” pieces like TV and movie parodies are by far the most fun but they are a killer amount of work. These two and three page jobs are a lot less intense and usually require very little research (i.e. watching movies and TV shows!) by comparision.