Lee K. Seitz writes about this post concerning the time Sergio Aragonés had a problem with the mails and didn't get any of his cartoons into an issue of MAD. That was in 1967 and it has never happened again to this day…
As often seems to happen because you write so darn fast, I get way behind on your blog. Then I binge a bit to catch up. This is why I'm just now writing about something you discussed way back on February 18.
Your post about Dick DeBartolo's streak ending was fascinating (and a touch sad). But the bit about Sergio's streak got me thinking, "So what did they do for the issue Sergio missed? Did they rerun some of his past marginals? There's been so many, who'd notice?"
So I googled the cover of #111. I was surprised to find that I have that issue! I "inherited" them from my mother's stash back when I was a lad in the late '70s. Many of the covers are no longer attached to their magazines, but I've got them and read them — or at least portions of them — many times back then.
So now, without having to resort to asking you, I know what they did instead of "Mad Marginals": "Songs That Didn't Make It." Now I have to wonder who came up with these titles. I'd guess it was a last minute effort by whatever staff happened to be around at the time.
You'd guess right, Lee, though I'd bet that most of 'em (if not all) came from Nick Meglin, who then had the title of Associate Editor. Nick not only associated with the editor but he wrote most of the funny stuff in MAD that was not credited to freelance writers like Frank Jacobs or Larry Siegel. The other Associate Editor, Jerry DeFuccio, may have come up with a few.
Some folks don't know this but MAD existed for a long time before my buen amigo Sergio began contributing to MAD. He first turned up in MAD #73 cover-dated January of 1963. They bought a bunch of cartoons he'd drawn about astronauts and ran them over two pages in that issue. When they handed him his check, they invited him to contribute more to the magazine. Little did they know how fast and prolific this new member of The Usual Gang of Idiots could be.
He was back with more submissions faster than you could say "Melvin Cowznofski," assuming you could say "Melvin Cowznofski," which not everyone can. Try it and see. They probably could have fired all their writers and artists and just filled each issue after than with Sergio cartoons but for some reason, they didn't want to do that. They took more of his material but gently broke the news to him that there was a limit as to how much work he could sell them. Sergio, even at that age, wasn't much for limits. He came up with a clever way to increase that limit.
MAD from its outset had always been a publication that gave you a lot for your money, cramming gags into backgrounds and attaining a certain density of comedy per page. I remember when I bought my first issue — number 70, which I bought off the rack not long before the day my partner-to-be walked into the MAD offices for the first time. I spent hours going over every inch of every page, constantly noticing funny little things I hadn't noticed before.
And I noticed the marginal gags…little texts stuck perpendicular or upside-down or even right-side-up in the margins throughout the magazine.
The gags in the margin first appeared in MAD #29, the first issue edited by Al Feldstein after Harvey Kurtzman left. Much of that issue consisted of material Kurtzman had been working on and I am at a loss to say whether the marginals were an innovation of the Feldstein era or if they were something Kurtzman had in the works. In #29, they were just gags sprinkled around the pages and went unmentioned in the Table of Contents. In #30, they were listed there as the "Nobody asked us but — Department" and credited to Arnie Rosen and Coleman Jacoby, two gents who became very important comedy writers in television.
Arnie was, in fact, a producer on my first TV writing job, The Nancy Walker Show in 1976 but he did a lot more than that. Among the shows that he and Jacoby worked on that you've heard of were The Phil Silvers Show (aka Sgt. Bilko), The Carol Burnett Show, Get Smart and The Garry Moore Show. Both men were already writing for television when they made this contribution to MAD and I don't think they did much (if anything) else for the magazine. All future marginal gags were uncredited.
On the Table of Contents page, they'd give the premise of the marginal gags in each issue. In #70, it was "If they had a brother, brother!" Here, freshly-scanned from the exact same copy of MAD #70 that I purchased in 1962 when I was ten years of age, is a sample gag from that issue…
Get it? Anyway, right after Sergio sold that first article and a few others, he came up with the idea to replace the text gags with tiny cartoons. He says this was because, with his then-limited English and this his equally-limited knowledge of American people, places and things, he just didn't understand the text gags. Me, I think he was just looking to make extra room for his cartoons in the magazine so they'd pay him more. Nick Meglin and the others who wrote the text gags loved the concept because it meant they didn't have to write all those text gags…except the one issue where the post office screwed up.
Editor Feldstein didn't buy the idea at first. To "sell" it, Sergio drew some real tiny gags and pasted them into a copy of MAD…and Feldstein didn't even notice them at first. Once he did, he decided the idea might be fun for an issue or two but, of course, no one could come up with 12-18 pantomime cartoons per issue. Sergio then came up with enough for more than fifty years. This is not humanly possible but then neither is he.