The cartoon above ran in this past week’s Air Mail, where you can also find a great article on the best MAD Exhibition you’ll ever see. But more on that in a moment.
The irony of me calligraphically writing out the words to the cartoon above like the guy in the image wasn’t lost on me… it took a few goes to get it looking like it might have been hastily penned before dawn by a harried gentleman in the Gilded Age.
06/18: New Yorker vs. Rolling Stone
The less said about this match, the better. We were rolled over by this team in short order. It was a bloodbath.
This coming Friday, June 21st at the Norman Rockwell Museum, Emily Flake and I will interview each other about how MAD warped our brains, titled “Growing Up MAD”. It is part of a series of programming during the epic exhibition, “What, Me Worry? The Art and Humor of Mad Magazine”
_
From the Museum’s website: Join cartoonist, illustrator, and performer Emily Flake and cartoonist and comedian Jason Chatfield for a lively program exploring MAD magazine's impact on a younger generation of artists and writers.
Together Flake and Chatfield will share stories about their experiences reading MAD as kids and later what it was like to be contributors to this influential and beloved magazine. The presenters will delve into some of their favorite MAD signature features including Spy vs. Spy, MAD Fold-ins, Snappy Answers to Stupid Questions, the Marginals, and The Strip Club. The conversation will also trace the importance of MAD as a space for cultural critique and irreverent satire that continues to inspire their work today.
If you can’t make it in person, they are live streaming it over Zoom.
In the catalogue, the former MAD editor John Ficarra writes, “Some people remember where they were when man first walked on the moon. Others can recall where they were when they first heard the Beatles. Me, I can tell you exactly where I was the first time I ever saw a copy of MAD Magazine.”
So can I. It was at a day camp in Connecticut, circa 1990. I was six years old. I don’t think I got a single one of the written jokes, but the drawings were a revelation. A family friend later gave me a couple of boxes of back issues from the 1970s and 1980s. The references—Spiro Agnew, OPEC, Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice—were largely new to me, but the visuals were instantly familiar. Because while Mad reflected an enormous amount of social and cultural upheaval in its pages, the magazine’s staff had less turnover than the Supreme Court.
So, whether you became a reader at the dawn of MAD or in its long twilight, you knew all the same artists: not just Mingo, Wolverton, Aragonés, Jaffee, Davis, and Drucker, but also Don Martin, Paul Coker, Dave Berg, Bob Clarke, George Woodbridge, Paul Peter Porges, Antonio Prohías, and Don “Duck” Edwing, not to mention Will Elder, Wally Wood, and Mad’s founder, Harvey Kurtzman. (MAD regularly repackaged old material in newsstand-only “Super Special” issues, exposing newer fans to the magazine’s archive and saving the publisher a bundle.)
I got to attend the opening of a brilliant exhibition featuring the work oft two talented New York artists, Laura El and Shani Nizan at the Philippe Labaune Gallery last week. If you’re in the city, it’s definitely worth stopping by for a look. Philippe always features the work of a wide array of comic artists and illustrators. You’ll see below why I was so entranced by the work of Shani Nizan…
Earlier this year I received a book that had me crying laughing on nearly every page. It's the kind of book that makes a cartoonist want to throw it all in and become a New Jersey bus driver. The book is called “Well, this is me!”— a reference to a cartoon trope that gets used a bunch to different effects. The cover gives you an idea of the absurdity inside.
Asher is prolific with his cartoon output and has one of the highest hit rates of ‘certified bangers’ of any cartoonist working today. He somehow fits his cartooning around his job writing for Stephen Colbert on TheLate Show.
The thing I like about Asher’s cartoons is that they not only reflect his comic voice, but the drawing style fits perfectly to the tone of the joke. They’re silly, they’re funny, the captions make you laugh even before you look back up at the image. His line economy is great; there aren’t any extraneous details pulling focus from the gag— same with the shading; it only ever leads the eye around the image the way he intends it to. He’s good. I’m a fan.
This week’s Sketchbookisfrom a live drawing gig at a rooftop in the Flatiron district. It is blurry. (Probably for the best.)
Want me to live draw your next event? Get in touch. 😎
While I do love the convenience of an iPad/Wacom/Xenselabs tablet…I can’t ever replicate the joy of using simple analog tools. I’m launching a new Substack called “Process Junkie”to explore all of the joys of the Process of making art. If you’re interested in that kind of thing, you can sign uphere.
