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Michael McLeod
OK APART FROM COMPLAINING ABOUT BEING BORED I'VE BEEN BEEN LOOKING BACK AT OLD STORIES, AS BORED OLD GUYS LIKE ME TEND TO DO.
CAN'T REMEMBER HAVING WRITTEN THIS ONE - THAT'S HOW OLD AND CREAKY I AM.
BUT I THOUGHT YOU MIGHT ENJOY IT; ASSUMING YOU LIKED MAD MAGAZINE AS MUCH AS I DID, BACK IN THE DAY. I HAVE A COUPLE OF CLASSMATES IN PARTICULAR IN MIND WHEN I SAY THAT. YOU KNOW WHO YOU ARE, IDIOTS.
AND SERIOUSLY I'M NOT TOTALLY DEPRESSED OR ANYTHING. GOT A POOL OUT BACK FER CRYIN' OUT LOUD.
MM
By Michael Mcleod | Orlando Sentinel
UPDATED: October 25, 2018 at 11:40 PM EDT
Squit!
Zonk!
Womf!
Bleechh!
Perhaps you are unfamiliar with these terms. Not to worry. Every job has its jargon. “Kwoosh!” and “Schlurp!” may mean nothing to the layperson. But Duck Edwing would be lost without them.
Edwing is an idiot.
That’s what he and his fellow writer-illustrators have always called themselves, proclaiming it month after month, right there in the table of contents, where it always reads: “Written by the usual gang of idiots.”
Edwing is a cartoonist for Mad, a scruffy monthly that took root during the Cold War era and began lampooning everything on the American landscape that wasn’t nailed down, from politicians to movie stars to toothpaste commercials.
From the beginning, Mad’s artists have used goofy monosyllables to punctuate a cartoon character’s encounter with some horrible fate, like being blenderized in a revolving door. Superhero comic books call for a repertoire of “Pow!” “Biff!” and “Ka-boom!” Mad says: “Poit!”
Edwing has written for the magazine for more than 40 years. It shows. He has the body of a 68-year-old man but the sense of humor of a grade-schooler.
“I’m still doing the same thing I did when I was 8 years old,” he says. “It’s like I got a real good paper route, and I just kept it.”
He lives in Ormond Beach in a gated community filled with perfectly normal-looking manufactured homes, with a peaceful lake just outside his door, a groundskeeper or two always hovering nearby and an elegant wife of 20 years in the living room.
She is a cross between Zsa Zsa Gabor and Mother Teresa, with stunning blue eyes, a soft voice and the patience of a saint. Her real name is Claire, but she answers to “Cluck.” Edwing thought it would be amusing for them to have matching nicknames.
Cluck is an amazingly tolerant individual. She would have to be. She is married to an idiot.
EDWING LIKES TO TALK — AND TALK
Many of Mad magazine’s original artists had a reputation for being wild on the page but subdued in real life. This was particularly true of its lead cartoonist, the late Don Martin, whose license plate said “SHTOINK” and whose characters looked like elongated reflections in a funhouse mirror.
“In all the years that I knew him, I don’t think Don Martin said more than a thousand words to me,” says longtime Mad editor Nick Meglin. “Duck, on the other hand, won’t shut up.”
It’s impossible to be in Edwing’s presence for more than five minutes without hearing him tell the kind of joke generally associated with The Rotary Club Luncheon Speaker From Hell.
Such as:
“Why are there so many insecure German shepherds? Because there are no German sheep.”
And:
“How come the weatherman always says it’s partly sunny, but at night, he never says it’s partly moony?”
And:
“Jeffrey Dahmer had his mother over for dinner. She said, “I don’t think I like your friends.” He said, “That’s OK. Just eat your salad.”
A SIGNATURE STYLE
Edwing gets up around 5 a.m. every day, has coffee and a cigarette on his front porch, then heads back inside to work until early afternoon in a makeshift studio just down the hall from his living room.
From here he writes an ongoing feature in the magazine, “Tales From the Duck Side,” filled with characters such as “The Avenging Oar,” an enslaved rower on an ancient Roman galley who escapes his chains and comes back to pummel his former, whip-wielding tormentors.
His characters always have huge noses and pingpong-ball eyes. More often than not, they are facing some B-movie cataclysm. They tend to do a lot of dangling, either from chains in a dungeon or at the end of a hangman’s noose.
In a recent strip, a hapless, hairy prisoner is visited by a sweet-looking angel of death. She likes him so much that she takes pity on him. Instead of taking him to heaven with her, she grants him 50 more years of life — then flies away, oblivious to the fact that the hairy little man she left behind will remain manacled to the wall for all that time.
Edwing also creates the story lines for a newspaper version of “Spy vs. Spy,” a longtime Mad feature about two pointy-nosed spies — one dressed in white, the other in black — each of whom is always plotting the other’s elaborate demise.
Lately Edwing has been branching out by creating the animated illustrations for video slot machines — “Funny is money!” the slot manufacturers told him when he flew to Reno to see their sprawling, mile-long plant.
He has a pet project of his own, as well: an epic poem. At least, that’s how he describes it. It’s a Santa Claus story with spooky overtones — “sort of like if Edgar Allan Poe wrote The Night Before Christmas.”
“I just sit here and ask myself, What if? Like what if Zorro was really named Zelinsky? And what if he didn’t just mark the bad guys with a Z but spelled out his whole name on their chest? Would the bad guys say, ‘Please, sir, whatever you do, don’t dot the I’?”
There’s a picture of Betty Rubble from The Flintstones on one wall. Bookshelves are jammed with volumes about cartoons and human anatomy, stacks of Mad magazines, a bust of Mr. Spock and a tiny toy violin — a tribute to Edwing’s childhood hero, Sherlock Holmes, who played the instrument to relax from his crime-solving endeavors.
The ink Edwing uses leaches through the paper, so his drawing board is always covered in the fragmentary remains of his latest projects — exclamation points here and there, bits and pieces of dialogue, and those odd little figures with their bulbous eyes and noses.
A BORN CARTOONIST
Presiding over the scene is a bust of Alfred E. Neuman, leering over Edwing’s shoulder.
Neuman is Mad’s loopy-looking mascot. His image is borrowed from a turn-of-the-century ad about painless dentistry. So is his enigmatic mantra: “What — me worry?” When he first appeared in the ’50s, with his unruly red hair, missing tooth and vapid grin, he looked like a deranged Howdy Doody.
But he was right. For a while, at least, Mad had no worries. The magazine reached a circulation of nearly 3 million, spawned several lesser imitators such as Cracked and Thimk, and influenced a generation of humorists ranging from actor Chevy Chase to Far Side cartoonist Gary Larson.
As hard as it is to imagine in these days of radio shock jocks, video jackasses and lowbrow Web sites, there was a time when sick humor was hard to come by. Mad had the market cornered. It was crass before crass became cool.
But the best incubator for satire is a culture that wants to pretend that everything’s OK. Nobody has the nerve to do that these days. What was once underground humor has percolated into the mainstream. Though a television takeoff is doing well, Mad, the magazine, has lost part of its cachet and most of its circulation, which is down to about 250,000.
Yet unlike the scores of far more respectable magazines that have disappeared since 1952, Mad is still around, with its format basically unchanged. Next month, in a baby-boomer milestone that doesn’t quite match up to Mick Jagger turning 60 or Paul Newman showing up at a press conference wearing a hearing aid, Mad will celebrate with a special 50th-anniversary issue.
As always, Duck Edwing will be among the contributors.
All the jokes, all the projects, all the crazy ideas — in most places, they’d mark Edwing as a good for nothing, the first head to roll the next time the company downsizes. At Mad, it gets him job security.
“I can’t believe I have the privilege of working with a guy who made me laugh I don’t know how many times as a kid,” says Mad’s special-publications editor, Charles Kochman. “If an idea doesn’t click, he’ll let it go and move on to something else. He just keeps tossing the spaghetti against the wall till something finally sticks.”
Edwing, whose given name is Donald, grew up in Hudson County, N.J., just across the river from New York City. “There was a lot of crime, violence, mayhem, murder — and outside the house it was even worse.”
He began doodling at any early age, ignoring his parents’ admonitions that he was wasting his time. Later in life he worked at a hardware store, did a tour with the Navy as a photographer on board an aircraft carrier, and studied at the School of Visual Arts in Manhattan under Burne Hogarth, who took over the drawing of “Tarzan” from Hal Foster in the heydays of realistic, classically illustrated adventure strips.
He landed a job as an illustrator with RCA and did free-lance cartoons for more-traditional magazines such as The Saturday Evening Post, Esquire and Look before Mad’s first editor, Harvey Kurtzman, suggested he start submitting work to the magazine in 1961.
Frustrated when a receptionist continually forgot who he was, he started announcing himself as “The Falcon” when he came to Mad to pitch ideas, then later amended it to “Duck.”
“I guess it’s all from my experience in retail — you want people to remember you,” he says. “People don’t remember ‘Don.’ But they remembered Duck.”
Mad’s guru, owner/publisher William Gaines, once told Edwing: “You’re a born cartoonist. You make crazy drawings that make people laugh. Just keep doing that.”
THE RANKS THIN
Gaines was a huge, bearded man with a rumbling laugh who had a gargantuan likeness of King Kong poised just outside his office window, peering into Mad’s Madison Avenue headquarters. He had been a comic-book publisher, but in the early ’50s, when McCarthyism swept the nation, a group of psychologists and legislators claimed that some of the horror comics he published were corrupting the youth of the day. Gaines eluded the censors by trying his luck with a humor magazine.
Gaines alternately harassed and pampered his Mad cartoonists, quibbling over minor expenses but then taking them on yearly globe-trotting expeditions. Edwing was usually among the dozen or more offbeat artists who headed off to Denmark, Sicily, Russia, Tahiti, Africa, England, Italy, Spain. They whiled away their time by playing gags on each other. Once, on a cruise ship, Edwing and his fellow artists decided to re-enact a famous Marx Brothers scene.
They arranged to show up at Gaines’ stateroom, one by one, with some minor but urgent matter to discuss. Then they bribed several waiters and housekeepers to knock on Gaines’ stateroom door and file into the room until it was overflowing with people.
They were like crazy fraternity boys turned loose from campus.
“Actually, no fraternity would have these guys,” says author Maria Reidelbach, who wrote a history about the magazine’s glory days called Completely Mad in 1991.
As crazy as they were, she says, many of the artists were actually brilliant social commentators. “But not Duck,” she says. “Duck was just vulgar.”
He was awfully good at it. Edwing collaborated with Martin for years and actually took over as ghostwriter of Martin’s features in the mid-’70s, when the more highly publicized artist began running out of ideas.
“They came to me and said, ‘We can’t put your name on the feature,” Edwing recalls. “I told them, ‘That’s OK. Just put my name on a check.’ “
Edwing played ghostwriter yet another time, taking over the writing of “Spy vs. Spy” when its creator, Antonio Prohias, retired.
The ranks of the usual gang have grown thinner over the years. Gaines died in 1992. Prohias died in 1998. Martin died in Miami a year and a half ago.
But several of the magazine’s early writers and illustrators are still cranking it out. Al Jaffee does the back-cover “fold-in” — a gag picture that becomes a funny scene if you fold it a certain way. Mort Drucker still does the movie parodies. Sergio Aragones still spoofs movies and decorates the margins with assorted lunatic creations. Duck Edwing and the Avenging Oar are still hard at work.
Edwing says that he and his fellow artists take pride in the longevity of an irreverent creation that schoolkids once had to hide inside textbooks and underneath mattresses.
Not that he has any illusions that he is producing immortal artwork. An encounter he once had with his high-school art teacher took care of that.
He saw her on the streets of Manhattan one day and called out to her.
“Mrs. McKeon!” he said. “I’m one of your students! Remember me? Donald Edwing? I’m an artist for Mad now!”
She stood there on the corner of 44th and Broadway and studied him for a long moment.
Then she said: “Who?”
Originally Published: August 5, 2002 at 12:00 AM EDT
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