Sunday Mailbag- MAD Meetings?

Q: Did you have the chance to meet Don Martin? He was a bit of a hero of mine when I was a kid in the seventies. Have you met many of the earlier “Usual Gang of Idiots”?

A: Don Martin was also one of my favorites as a kid reading MAD in the 70’s! Sadly, no, I never got to meet him. He left MAD in 1987, so he was long gone by the time I started with MAD. In fact, he passed away in early 2000, just a few months before I got my first MAD assignment. A number of the Usual Gang were gone/passed away before I started with the magazine, and I never had the chance to meet them. Those included Harvey Kurtzman, Normal Mingo, Wally Wood, Antonio Prohias and Bill Gaines. Some others who were still around (on Planet Earth at least) that I never got the chance to meet were Will Elder, Dave Berg, George Woodbridge, Larry Siegel, Harry North and Stan Hart.

However I have been lucky enough to have met many of the greats among the “Usual Gang of Idiots”. Some just in passing and some I am lucky enough to be able to call good friends.

MAD used to have a holiday party every December at the Society of Illustrators, and that tradition lasted a few years into my time with the magazine. The Lovely Anna and I made time to travel to New York for that event for the few years it still was going on, and I met a number of the Usual Gang there. My first year I remember meeting Al Jaffee, Paul Coker Jr. (I think that was the first party) Dick DeBartolo, Paul Peter Porges, Angelo Torres, John Caldwell, and Desmond Devlin, as well as a gaggle of “new” idiots like myself including Garth Gerhart, Barry Liebman, and Liz Lomax. At later holiday parties and other MAD functions I met Frank Jacobs, Hermann Mejia, Arnie Kogen, Teresa Burns Parkhurst, Don “Duck” Edwing, Scott Bricher, James Warhola, and a lot of other people I am no doubt forgetting.

I met and got to know Mort Drucker and Jack Davis before I ever started for MAD through the National Cartoonists Society, and became friends with them both as well as with Al Jaffee and especially Nick Meglin and Sergio Aragonés through the Society, all three of whom became dear friends. I also met Bob Clarke, Kevin Pope, Grey Blackwell, John Kovaleski, R.J. Matson and Ray Alma at a few Reuben Award Weekends. Ray and I are good friends, having been on a few USO tours together. I met Sam Viviano, Roberto Parada, Frank Kelly Freas, C.F. Payne, Mark Fredrickson and Drew Friedman at various International Society of Caricature Artists conventions where they were speakers. I’ve seen a few of those guys multiple times but Sam and I are good friends, both from our MAD days working together and in outside life. I’ve been very close friends with Ed Steckley since he was 17 years old and worked for me as a caricaturist in one of my theme park operations.

I met Rick Tulka years ago when Anna and I took a trip to Paris where he’s lived for 30 or so years now. We have managed to see him and his wife Brenda every time we visit Paris, which is always a treat.

There are lots of other MAD creators I’ve met here and there, Like Arie Kaplin, Anton Emdin, Kit Lively, Johnny Sampson, Amanda Conner, Monte Wolverton… I’ll never be able to name them all. It’s always a pleasure to get to meet one of the “Usual Gang of Idiots”.

Thanks to nursecarmen (via 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!