Well, I guess it's an honor. It's something.
The current issue of Mad, the one just coming out, is #476. The first MAD work by Sergio Aragonés appeared in #76, which was the January, 1963 issue. He missed one issue so this new one represents the 400th time his artistry has appeared in America's most popular humor magazine.
This is not the record. Mike Slaubaugh maintains lists of these things and if we consult the relevant tote board for this category, we see that Al Jaffee has had work in 427 issues. Tied for third are Dick DeBartolo and Mort Drucker, each of whom has been in 391 issues. Since Drucker is not in every issue lately and DeBartolo is, Dick will probably have third place to himself as of next month. (In fifth place, we see Dave Berg with 386 appearances but he's not likely to challenge anyone, having died in 2002.)
In the meantime, I am locked in about a ninety-way tie for 237th place, having contributed two pieces to the magazine. This is so much more impressive than that guy on Jeopardy! yesterday. He only managed to create a three-way tie.
On another list of his, Mike notes that DeBartolo holds the record for the most consecutive issues of MAD with 374, followed by Sergio with 365. Sergio had no work in MAD #111 because…well, his recollection is that the post office lost what he mailed in for that issue. Personally, I'd like to believe it was something more embarrassing so when people ask me, I always make up something that involves a morals charge, a stay in prison and maybe a couple of farm animals.
You may also be interested in this list of Mike's that charts circulation figures over the years. This looks pretty dreadful for MAD but there aren't a lot of other magazines where the list wouldn't tell a similar story.
Getting back to Sergio for a moment. His first appearance in MAD was with a batch of astronaut cartoons but he instantly became known for the tiny cartoons in the margins of the pages — the ones that look like this…
Before he came along, MAD had text gags in those spaces. They called the feature "Marginal Thinking" and the jokes sometimes took the form of a little lecture by a character named Marginal Marvin. The lines were written by the editorial staff and it was quite a drain on their time and creativity.
Sergio is, as we all know, an extremely fast cartoonist. He wanted to sell a lot of work to MAD but there was a limit as to how much they could buy from him without firing all their other artists. Since his English then was severely limited, he didn't get the text gags in the margins and thought that maybe he could replace them with his drawings, thereby creating more space for his work in the magazine. The editors liked the suggestion since it got them out of filling those spaces themselves, but they thought of it as a brief respite. Surely, they believed, the new kid from Mexico wouldn't be able to come up with gags like that for every issue and they'd have to go back to the text gags. Four hundred issues later, he's still filling those spots and Marginal Marvin still can't catch a break.