Visual Arts

The wordless cartoons of Sergio Aragones have appeared in virtually every issue of Mad magazine since 1963.

Times have changed, but not Mr. Aragones' enduring flair for staging silent hilarity on the pages (and also in the margins) of America's most recognized satire publication.

Why does he continue to work for Mad ?

"I have a mortgage," Mr. Aragones says from his home in Ojai, Calif. "And, to me, life is just waking up and thinking ideas and then growing them."

The multiaward-winning comic artist and writer was born in Spain in 1937 and immigrated to the United States from Mexico in 1962. He is also creator of the barbarian humor comic book Groo the Wanderer.

If not for Mad magazine, would we be talking now?

No, I doubt it completely.

How did you become a member of the Usual Gang of Idiots?

I had just arrived [in New York] from Mexico in 1962. And every magazine I went to, everybody rejected me because I had been doing pantomime cartoons. Everybody said, "These things are crazy, you should go to Mad." So I went to Mad. And they were right.

Were you the first to do "marginal thinking" humor in the margins of Mad?

Graphically, yes. But what they had before was text in the borders, and they were references to movies and books. And when I started reading Mad in English in the office, I kept asking Jerry DeFuccio, one of the editors, "What does that mean?"

And every time I asked, he said, "Well, did you read this book?" or "Did you see that movie?" I said, "No." And he said, "Well, you wouldn't understand it." So I figured out we have to do something with my pantomime that everybody could understand.

When did you get interested in pantomime?

When I was in Mexico. I have always loved pantomime in the theater. And when I saw Marcel Marceau give a lecture at the University of Mexico, I found it fascinating.

One of the two mimes helping Marcel do the presentation was Alejandro Jodorowsky, who went on to make movies like El Topo and Santa Sangre. He's a great, great man, and he opened a pantomime school. So I joined, not to be a professional mime, but to apply it to my cartoons. I figured that it could help my cartoons a lot, because I could study the body movement.

McClatchy Newspapers

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