MAD's Greatest Artists: Sergio Aragones: Five Decades of His Finest Works
The MAD’s Greatest Artists series debuted with The Completely MAD Don Martin (2007), a two-volume, slipcased collection of the durable cartoon humor magazine’s indisputably maddest artist. It was a very hard act to follow, and truth be told, Aragonés’ work can’t match Martin in extravagant, alternate-reality ludicrousness. Aragonés is simply a gag cartoonist’s gag cartoonist, most comfortable with the pure sight gag or, as he calls it, the pantomime style of cartooning. His imagination for how things can turn out risibly differently than intended or expected seems inexhaustible, and so MAD has made him its equivalent of a photo-essayist, rendering the “MAD look” at everything from the space program (his first feature in the magazine) to dating to bullfighting and much more. His freehand, single-gauge line work (obtained by using just a fountain pen nib and no other, wider and narrower points) and sparely deployed shading constitute a cartoonist’s dream of a personal medium, capable of sustaining lightness no matter how much detail is rendered. --Ray Olson