Sunday Mailbag: Multiple MADness?

Q: A few issues ago you had two different pieces in the same issue of MAD. Has that ever happened before?

A: The issue Richard is referring to is MAD #525, which included both the Arnie Kogen scribed parody of “The Following” I did the art for, and the “Abysmal House” piece (written by Jay Rath) I drew for the “MAD 20”.

Having more than one piece is the same issue is a rare thing for me… for any illustrator really other than Sergio. More often than not these days I am doing “continuity” features for the magazine (i.e. the movie and TV parodies), and as these are long and time consuming I am seldom asked to do anything else for a single issue. It has happened occasionally, though. Seven times in fact. Most of the time I had done one substantial feature and then a spot illustration or some smaller piece for the Fundalini Pages, but occasionally I illustrated two multi-paged articles.

In issue #525, MAD asked me to do the art on the “Abysmal House” piece largely because I has just done a similar thing for another client, so they knew I could pull it off. Luckily I had just enough time to squeak it in under the deadline after having done six pages of “The Swallowing”. Here are the other issues I did multiple pieces for:

MAD #463: I did the art for the Arnie Kogen parody of “Everyone Hates Chris”, and a gag article called “MAD presents iToons” by Russ Cooper.

MAD #471: My main piece was for a video game spoof called “When Video Games Become Religious” by Jacob Lambert, and I also did a gag cartoon about Mel Gibson‘s anti-Semitic antics called “One Afternoon on the Pacific Coast Highway”.

MAD #480: Not sure this counts but I actually did three pieces in this issue. One was part of the main magazine, the art for Desmond Devlin‘s parody of “Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix”. Then in the special Ballpark Franks “advertising insert” I did the cover and a two page poster called “The Evolution of Hunger”. Probably doesn’t count. No doubt MAD historians will be arguing about if it does or doesn’t for centuries.

MAD #481: I did two short pieces in this issue… a one pager entitled “Things Shouted Out to Paris Hilton as She Left Prison” and a two pager called “Celebrity Yu-Gi-Oh Cards” written by Michael Arnold.

MAD #482: Wow, never realized until I looked this up this was three issues in a row with multiple pieces in them! I was one of several artists that did spot illustrations for “Mad’s 50 Worst Things About Advertising”, and also did a mash-up parody of “The Sopranos” and “America’s Next Top Model” entitled “Amercia’s Next Top Mobster” by Des Devlin.

MAD #502: I did a one page piece for the MAD 20 called “Henry Gates Arrested in Own Home – Beer & Loathing”, plus a two page Jacob Lambert written article entitled “Board Game-Based Movies We’ll Soon Be Seeing”.

MAD #503: Besides doing the art on Des Devlins parody of “The Big Bang Theory”, I also did a spot illustration for the Fundalini pages as part of the short feature “Reasons Cited by Sportswriters for Not Voting Mark McGwire into HoF”

MAD #525 is discussed above.

Hey, this is a good series to run for my “Monday MADness” feature! For the next few Mondays I’ll post some of the art from these double appearance issues.

Thanks to Richard Griffin 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!