Sunday Mailbag- Greatest of MAD’s UGOI?

Q: Whose work in MAD did you admire the most?

A: That’s almost impossible to answer, there were so many cartoonists and creators that were among the best ever who contributed to MAD, and I admire every single one of them.

Mort Drucker was the master of caricature and literally defined the movie/TV parody. Jack Davis was the greatest action/movement/physical cartoonist maybe ever. Wally Wood was a virtuoso of ink, light, and shadow, and could draw virtually anything from realism to humor better than anyone else. Will Elder‘s work was just plain hilarious to look at, and he was the “King of Chicken Fat” gags. Sergio Aragonés is the master of the pantomime cartoon and one of the greatest cartoonists ever. Harvey Kurtzman was a visual comedic savant. The list of masters that worked for MAD goes on and on.

That said, there are two MAD contributors who I consider a core part of the magazine’s DNA, and without whom I don’t think MAD would ever have been MAD.

The first is maybe the greatest pure cartoonist who ever put pen to paper and the artist/writer whom I admire the most… Al Jaffee. He was as great a writer as he was an artist, and he came up with some of the features that became the greatest highlights of the magazine over an amazing career- The “Fold-In”, “Snappy Answers to Stupid Questions”, the “Inventions” features, and many others. He also wrote many gags and articles for other artists, both credited and uncredited. He did cover writing. He even wrote a few movie/TV parodies. He did it all. His pure creativity seemed to be a bottomless well, and there was nothing he could not do. I do not use the term “genius” lightly. Al Jaffee is a cartooning genius. It’s a shame he retired because he was just getting the hang of it.

The other is a person who does not get anywhere near the attention he deserved for his enormous contributions to MAD… editor Nick Meglin. If there was an official title of “Unsung Hero of MAD Magazine”, Nick would without question wear that crown. While Al Feldstein got a lot of the credit (and a lot of the money) from the success of the post-Kurtzman MAD, a major part of the “voice” of MAD, the part that really made MAD “MAD” IMO, came from Nick. He understood humor better than anyone I’ve ever met. He knew what was funny, what was too easy, what was too complicated, what was exactly what the moment demanded. He had an innate sense of what worked as MAD humor and what did not.

Beyond his editing skills, Nick was a brilliant humor writer and wrote a great deal of material for MAD behind the scenes, uncredited of course, for not just many articles but for a lot of the “writer/artist” features that were staples of the magazine, and for which the single cartoonist creator got the sole byline. He ghost wrote material for many of the MAD paperbacks as well. He “punched up” material submitted by others and made everyone’s work funnier and better, again uncredited. He was selfless that way. Bill Gaines called Nick “The Heart of MAD“, which I think was an apt title. He was on the MAD staff in some capacity from 1956 to 2004, when he retired. Without Nick I do not think MAD would ever have become what it became. When he passed in 2018 the world lost a humor icon, and far too few people knew it.

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