While a restless teenager the somnolent late 1950s, I discovered MAD by accident, and it became a rare but longed-for survival tool. In and after the Sixties, it wasn’t so cool, but still. And today it yet survives, in a now-and-then form, and has reached a landmark that maybe you have to be of a certain age to appreciate. And I do.

Washington Post

By Michael Cavna
 — October 2, 2022

MAD magazine’s oldest active artist is still spoofing what makes us human


Sergio Aragonés has drawn for the publication since he arrived in New York from Mexico 60 years ago‚ and at age 85 he’s contributed to its 70th anniversary issue: ‘Drawing has become like walking.’

Legendary MAD cartoonist Sergio Aragonés, 85, pictured in his home studio in Ojai, Calif., attributes his longevity to the spice of variety. He embraces different projects so “your mind changes pace and position.” (The Aragonés family)

Sergio Aragonés had long read MAD magazine back in Mexico by the time he first landed in New York, toting fresh artwork and hope. He stepped through the humor outlet’s front doors 60 years ago, expecting to find the place as wild in spirit as the publication’s satirically hip pages. This was, after all, the home of the staff’s self-anointed “Usual Gang of Idiots.”

Instead, the recent college student was introduced to a relatively staid Madison Avenue office. Where was the whimsy? The MAD-cap frivolity? This was no clubhouse of high jinks.

“I thought it was going to be a lot of jokes on the walls,” Aragonés says by Zoom from his home in Ojai, Calif., where he celebrated his 85th birthday last month. After he was hired that day he walked in to sell his work, he suggested to publisher William Gaines, “Why don’t we paint one of the doors to make it look like an elevator — putting fake numbers at the top?” — befuddling visitors attempting to exit. Or perhaps better yet: “Why don’t we put a bomb in the roof with the sound effect ‘tick-tock-tick-tock’ ?”

“Bill looked at me like: ‘Sergio, this is an office of working people.’ He wanted the office to be very functional.”

What cartoonists cannot create in life, however, they are armed to imagine on the canvas. So for a new comic, Aragonés has drawn busy MAD office workers momentarily donning character masks — think “Spy vs. Spy” and grinning mascot Alfred E. Neuman — to entertain kid visitors taking phone photos.

That strip is among a selection that Aragonés contributed to a special edition of MAD, publishing Tuesday, that marks the magazine’s 70th anniversary. Although the outlet has predominantly reprinted past material since it ceased regular publication in 2019, most of this special edition will be original content, including a Johnny Sampson back-page “fold-in”: a film parody of Robert Pattinson as “The Batman”; and a mini-essay by fan Jordan Peele (whose current film “Nope” features a fictional MAD cover).

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