End of the MADness #161: Severance!

Here we are at the end of the line… for now (there’s a wrap up at the bottom of this post). This parody of the TV show “Severance” was just published in MAD #47 (Feb 2026) last month, and is the most recent piece I have done for them. It was written by my CLAPTRAP cohort Desmond Devlin.

Pencils

This piece was a bit of a pain to do. It came in late with a short deadline and just as I was leaving on a two week trip with The Lovely Anna and oldest daughter The Animated Elizabeth to visit our youngest daughter The Effervescent Gabrielle in Orlando. So, I produced this entire four pager sitting at the dining table in our condo. I penciled it out using my 16″ XenceLabs pen display and my Macbook, printed the pencils at a FedEx office, inked it using a portable LCD light table one row at a time on 11×17 bristol using Tombow brush marker pens, scanned the inks with a portable A3 scanner, and colored it using Photoshop on that same Xencelabs pen display.

I actually use those Tombows for a lot of inking in the studio these days, but I don’t like using them on MAD jobs. They lack a certain amount of crispness and fine detail that I need a pen nib or real brush and inks to get. They work in a pinch, but I don’t like the final results quite as well.

Also you don’t really appreciate how important a good ergonomic studio chair is until you’ve had to sit on the horrors that are condo dining table chairs for 8-10 hour stretches.

Fortunately this one was only four pages, and with two weeks to do it I only had to spend about 1/2 the time working and got to spend the other half going to the theme parks and getting plenty of exercise pushing a 200+ lbs woman around in a wheelchair… Elizabeth does the parks like her late royal British namesake.

So… that’s it. My entire MAD career covered… at least up until today.

Epilogue

When I started this “look back at my work for MAD“, it was November of 2020. The global pandemic was in full swing. MAD had just announced it was going to full reprinted content and except for a new cover and a new “Fold-In”, there would be no more new content in the magazine. It looked like after 20 years as a principal member of “The Usual Gang of Idiots”, my time with MAD was over. I thought I might get the occasional cover assignment, or maybe now and then some small piece for some special need inside an issue, but the days of an assignment and work in every issue was over. That’s why I started doing this retrospective series with my first published piece from MAD #399, Nov 2000. Des and I crowdfunded CLAPTRAP about that time as well.

It turned out that things weren’t QUITE over. Over the next four years I did a couple of covers (four, actually). I also did the very occasional piece inside the magazine when circumstances needed them. Some were tributes to recently passed UGOI, some were for special issues (MAD‘s 70th anniversary, the 2024 elections, etc), but it was all very haphazard and usually many issues in between assignments.

Then in the spring of 2025 MAD once again started adding new content to each issue. Not a lot, 12-15 pages or so. Still in the last year I’ve had something new in every issue starting with #43 (June 2025), and I just finished a two pager for issue #48, which will make it six in a row. How long will this last? That’s anybody’s guess. In about 4 months they will be working on issue #50, which is actually MAD‘s 600th issue. I’d hope they’ll have a significant amount of new stuff in that milestone issue, but who really knows?

Here’s my MAD stats as of today:

• Years: 25 years 3 months
• Number of issues appeared in: 155
• Total number of features drawn: 175
• Movie Parodies: 44
• TV Parodies: 45
• Other: 82
• Most paired with writer: Desmond Devlin (53)
• Longest piece: Harry Plodder and the Lamest of Sequels; Star Bores: The Snores Awaken; Starchie Reconstituted/Riverdull (all 9)
• Longest consecutive issue streak: 71 (#495- #15 (#565))
• Most pages in a single issue: 15 (#1 (#551))
• Covers: 7
• Total interior pages: 714

That’s all folks! If you were masochistic enough to follow along these past five plus years, thanks for that. I will post peeks at new MAD stuff if/when I have some, but I won’t be posting the complete feature going forward. I was okay with that when the features were ancient history, but I was a little uncomfortable posting them the last handful of weeks when the issues they were in were being sold not too far in the past. Sneak peeks are fine but I’m quite sure MAD and DC would like you to BUY these issues to read this stuff. Doing so would certainly go a long way to helping the continuation of new MAD content. The world could use it.