MAD’S Website Golden Oldies

MAD has had several different website designs and redesigns over the last five or so years. They’ve done numerous things, like try and make it an extension of the magazine with original content updated weekly. As I wrote in the mailbag yesterday, I happened along at the time they were first attempting this, and it led to my getting some assignments that were not for print but for the website.

They actually had a separate editor that was handling the content, which generally involved a list or short article and some kind of image. Sometimes it was just a static article, but usually it involved some kind of javascript mouseover effect. There was even a time where they were doing some flash animation. It was a grand idea, but it was short lived, only lasting for a few months. I suspect the costs involved with paying the artists, writers, editor and web design people proved to be too much, or perhaps it was just too hard to get the site updated regularly enough. Maybe the corporate bean counters put a stop to it. Today their website is an extension of the DC Comic’s site, and doesn’t much reflect the magazine itself. It has a monthly update with some flash animation, and a PDF file of some sneak peeks at the current issue.

I think that’s a shame about the original content, as some of the web stuff was pretty funny. Scott Bricher ended up doing much of that art, since he was the resident digital artist in MAD’s bullpen. I only remember doing three pieces.

I was thinking about that web stuff I did for MAD when I answered the mailbag question, and I started wondering what happened to it. Some of the old stuff is archived on the new MAD site under Past Madness, but none of the early stuff that I did. Just for fun I googled several key words that related to the subjects of some of the ones I did. Low and behold, I found these orphaned pages circa August 2000:

Presidential Survivor

MAD’s Realistic Fantasy Football League

There’s some of the first art I ever did for MAD… how the hell did I ever get a call back??? Amazing what kind of stuff is sitting around on a server in cyberspace somewhere, that nobody bothered to delete. As far as I know, no links to these pages exist anywhere official.