Sunday Mailbag: After MAD?

Q: Is Viz your new MAD? Are you looking for other magazines where you can publish movie spoofs just in case Mad magazine is really ending?

A: This is good timing for this question, because I just delivered a couple of pieces for MAD #11’s “The MAD 20 Dumbest People, Events, and Things of 2019″, and they might be the last thing I do for MAD for a while… maybe ever.

I’ve been drawing for MAD for just over 19 years, so it’s been a big part of my life for a long time… but it’s never been my only, or even the biggest, source of my income as a freelancer. I’ll need to work a little harder now to go out and find new clients to replace my MAD income and add to the clients I already do work for, but I’ve always been looking for new clients. That’s what freelancers do.

MAD was a very unique publication. It allowed a lot of cartoonists a place for a type of humor and work that doesn’t really have another place anymore. It was the one final humor publication that paired artists and writers in the same way that comic books do, allowing writers to be writers and artists to be artists and combining the strengths of each. I’m not sure the void created by MAD‘s diminishment will get filled by any other publications or media, but we will see.

Viz has been fun to work with but you’ll never see a movie or TV parody in their pages. It’s a different animal and they usually work with cartoonists who write their own material, so I am a bit of a square peg there. I think the editors have been trying to come up with ideas and stories to take advantage of my skill set, but they have a whole magazine to put together and it might be they won’t have a lot of ongoing stuff for me to work on. I think if I want to keep contributing to Viz I’ll need to start writing my own stuff. In fact I’ve been approached by multiple publishers who want to work with me but in all cases they want me to pitch them concepts and do the writing, which is not something I’ve ever really done.

The MAD style film and TV spoofs are probably a thing of the past, unless we end up doing some sort of independent crowdsourced project. There is discussion about this among the Usual Gang of Idiots but nothing is really on the table yet. Again… we’ll see.

Thanks to Dominick Zeillinger for the question. If you have a question you want answered about cartooning, illustration, MAD Magazine, caricature or similar, e-mail me and I’ll try and answer it here!