Monday MADness- Sam Viviano Interview!

1981 MAD Cover by Sam Viviano!

I came across this January interview with longtime MAD artist and current MAD VP of Art and Design (over 16 years as art director) Sam Viviano over at PrintMag.com. It’s a look at the nuts and bolts (mostly nuts) of the design and production of everyone’s favorite satirical humor magazine, as well as Sam’s history with the magazine… well a very truncated version of it anyway. Here’s an excerpt:

In 1980, Viviano received a call from MAD editor Al Feldstein, who was searching for a replacement for longtime cover artist Norman Mingo, who had passed away a few months earlier. Viviano was assigned the cover of MAD #223 (June 1981), which featured Larry Hagman as J.R. Ewing. Four years passed before Viviano received another assignment from MAD–a parody of the movie Ghostbusters.

“Little by little, over the following years, I did more and more work for MAD,” Viviano recalls. “I always thought of myself as a kind of utility infielder because I could do pretty much anything. I still did a lot of magazine work, book covers and advertising illustrations, but more and more of my output was devoted to MAD.”

Go on over to PrintMag.com for the full story.