Monday MADness Interlude: We’re Moving!

We interrupt the incessant and increasingly idiotic idling through my work at MAD because it was at this point in the timeline that it was announced MAD was moving from its New York City home of 65 years to sunny Burbank, California.

Most people who read this blog already know this story, but this next paragraph is the tl;dr version of why this happened:

In 2015 DC Entertainment closed up the New York City offices of its DC Comics publishing group and moved everything to the Warner Bros Complex out in Burbank. MAD was part of those publishing operations and the magazine’s offices were part of the DC offices. Even after offers were made by DC to entice them, none of the MAD staff would move to Burbank. The suits at DC, knowing that without this staff there was no MAD Magazine, acquiesced and rented office space in NYC just for MAD. DC moved and MAD remained behind in NYC, moving office locations a couple of times.

Fast forward to this point in our chronological crawl through my time at MAD, seven years ago in mid March 2017. The Bleeding Cool website broke the news that DC was finally going to move MAD to Burbank. Art Director Sam Viviano had told me a week or so earlier that this was coming, and swore me to secrecy. I’m sure he did that with many other regular contributors as I’m sure editorial did with the regular writers. No one would want to find out via some leaked story on the web. Regardless, it was shocking news.

DC did make secondary offers to SOME of the NYC staff. I’m not sure who got offers and who did not. Shortly after the news broke, Sam told me as far he knew only fairly new production artist Bern Mendoza had agreed to move out to Burbank. Just like in 2015, none of the senior editorial or art staff would go. Later on Sam told me he would have considered doing it because of certain life circumstances at the time, but he was one of the MAD staff that did not get a second offer. Had I known at the time that would have surprised me, because if DC really wanted to keep some continuity with the NYC MAD and the Burbank MAD, Sam would have been one of the most important people on staff who could have provided that.

I had to ask myself at the time, what changed? Why did they think they could move MAD now when they couldn’t two years earlier?

In just a few months we’d have the answer to that. It turned out all along DC had been actively looking for an answer for a main editor for MAD when DC co-publisher Dan DiDio approached Bongo Comics co-founder and former Bongo creative director, and longtime comics writer/artist Bill Morrison about taking the job. At the time Bill had stepped away from Bongo and was involved in another animated TV project that had taken a sideways direction and his original role was also going sideways, so he happened to be available and of course loved MAD. He agreed to become the Executive Editor.

So with hindsight this was why DC decided to pull the trigger on moving MAD to Burbank. They felt they had their person to assemble and head the new staff, which was the linchpin they needed. This is speculation on my part, but they probably wanted Bill to build his core staff, and that’s why they didn’t make another offer to Sam. However it’s also likely they were happy to not have to pay whatever they had originally offered Sam to make that move, since I can practically guarantee you that new MAD art director Suzy Hutchinson got paid significantly less than whatever Sam’s offered financial package was.

At that point in time none of us knew anything about any of this, of course. We only knew they were moving at the end of the year. There was a lot of uncertainty about what the future would hold for our beloved magazine.