Sunday Mailbag

Q: Here’s an obscure question about your history with MAD Magazine: What was your longest run of appearing in consecutive issues?

A. I had to look that one up. I am terrible at remembering things like issue numbers or what I did for what issue. To combat this, I keep a list that I simply add to the bottom of with each new MAD job.

Prior to the magazine going quarterly, the longest number of issues I had consecutive appearances in was 11, starting with “MAD‘s Exclusive Backstage Tour of The Family Guy” in MAD # 458 (Oct. 2005), and ending with “Stuporman Reruns!” in MAD #468, (Aug 2006). That was the longest run of consecutive months I ever did. That said, I am currently on a run of 15 consecutive issues, starting with “The Dork Knight” in MAD #495 (Nov. 2008) through “Muddled Family” in the current issue, MAD #509 (June 2011), but with the reduction in number of issues a year that started with issue #500, there were sometimes three months between some of those issues.

I also happen to know I will have a movie parody in MAD #510, due out in June, which will bring me up to 16 issues in a row. How do I know I’m in #510?…because I am busy drawing the ferslugginer thing right now. That means I only have 391 more consecutive issues to go before I tie Dick DeBartolo‘s record 406 issue streak. At the current rate of publication, I’ll do my 407th consecutive issue in April, 2076. I’ll be 109 years old, which is just a little younger than Al Jaffee is now.

Thanks to Grant Jonen 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 your questions and I’ll try and answer them here!