Monday MADness- Nick Meglin!

How about something a little different this week? The piece above is of longtime editor of MAD Magazine Nick Meglin. When Nick retired from MAD several years ago, they put together a “MAD Book” for him. This is something they used to do for Bill Gaines after each of the famous MAD trips. All the artists and writers who went on the trip would do a piece of art or prose inspired by their adventure, often times very “blue”, off color ,or outrageous, and these pieces would be assembled into a book presented to Bill as a thank you. At some point they started doing the same for longtime contributors. I am not sure if there was an actual number of years one had to be one of the Usual Gang of Idiots in order to get honored by a book, but now and again they’d do a MAD book for somebody. I was only asked to contribute to two, one for the great Frank Jacobs, and one for Nick.

Nick is a comedic genius, understands visual humor as much as he does written humor (which is to say A LOT) because he’s a hell of an artist. He is also someone I am lucky to be able to call a good friend. He was instrumental in my getting a chance at MAD, and gave me a great deal of valuable advice as a mentor. He also very generously wrote the forward for my book, and I used this very illustration to accompany that forward.

Anyway, I was proud to do this for him back in 2004. Real, live watercolor.