Making of a MAD Man Part 1
My Journey to MAD Magazine and Idiot-dom
I Want to Be An Idiot
Non-Diary Dreamer Department
I wanted to be a cartoonist all my life. Well, that’s not entirely true. Actually, when I was in elementary school I wanted to be a basketball player. My dream of being a basketball star went by the waist side when everyone got taller and left me, well by their waist side!
As my basketball dreams was literally and figuratively out of sight, I focused on my other dream of being a syndicated comic strip cartoonist. My mom says “I was born with a pencil in my hand” - which makes me question what she was eating and drinking during pregnancy!
I loved Garfield, Mother Goose and Grimm and my favorite, Peanuts. In high school, my family took a trip to California and visited the Charles Schulz Museum in Santa Rosa. It was an amazing experience. We went around the whole museum while my dad and brother tailed off to let my mom and I experience it more in-depth at our leisure. When I met up with my dad later, he said “I was sitting in on this artist talk and the guy is pretty good. Maybe you’d be interested.” We went in and Tom Richmond was doing a talk about caricatures. They were life changing. Funny, exaggerated and completely dead on. Image after image, I was stunned and drooling all over my shirt.
As the talk ended, Tom showed the opening spread artwork he just finished for MAD Magazine for the movie, Spiderman 2. I was so excited for the second Spiderman movie and now I was looking at amazing cartoon comic art making fun of it! I didn’t think life could get any better. (Mind you, this was before they started battering and deep frying everything in the world.) I sat in wide eyed amazement and thought I can’t do that. Ruh-roh.
It had caricatures, amazing line work and colors together. Oh and stupidity! Spiderman’s fly was open so his underwear was showing, Doc Ock had big bandages on his tentacles and there was a paper that said “Man Bites Dog, Dog Sues.” The best was a spider web coming from the middle of Spiderman’s legs which I remember Tom saying, “Yeah, I’m surprised I got away with that one.”
The museum announced that they would be doing a caricature workshop with Tom in about five minutes upstairs for free. I went with a little encouragement from my parents. Tom started by asking for a volunteer that he could do a caricature demonstration of. My parents were very insistent that it was me, but being a teenager who looked quite younger than his actual age - short, scrawny and embarrassed, I wasn’t as insistent. I was naturally picked and had to go up in front of everyone for an artist to piece by piece pick apart my face and draw me. Woo-hoo…
I was a good sport and a very jokey guy so I can take a joke just like I dished them out. I stood there as he stared me down and everyone laughed along with each stroke of his marker. He drew me on chart paper with big muscles and a mom tattoo because hell, my mom was the whole reason he was drawing me! Plus if I flexed, my “muscles”, they would fall down and swing back and forth like Bugs Bunny’s.
I left the workshop with a caricature in my hand and MAD Magazine obsessively in my head. I was on a mission - I need to get that magazine that had the Spiderman art in it. Many years later after hanging and talking to Tom on multiple MAD occasions as contributors, I told him this story at a party after a beer or two. He was a bit surprised to say the least.
We went to a mall shortly afterwards and I was searching for the MAD art in the newsstands but it wasn’t out yet. I settled for the latest issue and was amazed by the diverse outstanding artwork in the magazine. I was fascinated with Richmond’s work and it really stood out but there were other guys that were cool too like Mort Drucker, Hermann Mejia, Tom Bunk, Paul Coker and John Caldwell (my all-time favorite since he was much goofier looking and simplified with his artwork, just like I liked to draw!) Plus, he had this squiggle in his line which was so intriguing. How? Why?
I became obsessed with MAD for the art. I didn’t read it as much as I should have early on because as a wannabe cartoonist, I was just obsessed with the art. The words were secondary to me. It was an art magazine. What’s reading? Paper, pencil, draw? Now when I drew comic strips and editorial cartoons for my high school paper, it had chicken fat - gags on top of gags. Horrible ones but gags no less.
My MAD subscription and obsession continued when I entered college. Every month, I wanted to study more art. I went onto the MAD website wishing they had online content in between issues and saw they had internships in the New York offices for art and editorial. Art meant graphic design which I wasn’t into at all.
I wanted to be a cartoonist dammit! Where are the cartooning internships?! I want to be a part of the Usual Gang of Idiots! (The affectionate name for the MAD contributors)
I applied for both art and editorial. I knew I wasn’t a designer so I wasn’t getting the art internship and I only really read parts of the magazine so I probably wouldn’t get the editorial job either!
I wrote and mocked up my own outtakes from different TV shows such as The Office, Muppets etc. which was a recurring feature in the magazine at the time. It was something fun to do on a rainy Saturday night. I submitted and thought nothing of it. Maybe I already was an idiot in spirit?
I wasn’t going to get it but I could dream right? It’ll be another summer doing art for no one and taking summer classes that I hated. Yay.
On a slow Monday morning, I decided to check my gmail account on an actual desktop computer, which at the time I didn’t really use or check consistently. No one emailed it as it wasn’t my main account but it was professional and wasn’t a cringey AOL account made when I was in elementary school. Plus no smartphone to easily check it whenever I want. To my astonishment, there was an email from Amy V. at MAD sent on Friday afternoon offering me an editorial internship.
What just happened?
I felt like I was being called up to the big leagues. I better start reading the whole magazine…
Look out for Part 2 soon - working my dream job as a MAD Editorial intern.
What a great story. Loved me some John Caldwell.