OJAI — So you've just dipped into one of Sergio Aragones' cartoons. Relax. Make yourself at home. The artist would like you to feel perfectly at ease in the miniature cosmos he has created, which, you may have observed, is as spatially balanced and packed with information as a Medieval prayer book.
Notice the careful detailing -- of the rustic Mexican village street, the rock concert, the battlefield, whatever. Aragones, the 71-year-old master of Mad magazine cartoon marginalia, is obsessed with such accuracy and verisimilitude. No matter how outlandish the premise or bizarre the subject, he inspires his loyalists, some of whom have been following his work for 50 years, to believe in the well-ordered truthfulness of what they're seeing, and sense the elegant, disciplined mind behind it.
"My cartoons are always in equilibrium," says Aragones, arching his bushy eyebrows over round-rimmed glasses and a formidable Zapata mustache. "They do what I want them to do. They're very obedient."
"The viewer feels comfortable," continues the artist, a tall, solidly built, still-handsome man in shorts, sneakers and a sky-blue guayabera shirt, with a small graying ponytail that jiggles like a nervous question mark when he laughs. "It's a natural, subliminal encounter with a little universe. And the people who look at my comics, they get hooked. And I think it's because of the attention to detail."
There's a plethora of reasons why Aragones is being honored over the next few weeks with what the Ojai Valley Museum is billing as the first exhibition about his life and work, "Mad About Sergio" (through Oct. 4).
He's a distinguished artist who has carted off many awards, including the National Cartoonist Society's Reuben Award and the Will Eisner Hall of Fame Award. Besides his "Marginal Thinking" cartoons for Mad, which have embroidered the fringes of the humor magazine's comic panels for decades, he has acquired a worldwide audience for his comic book character Groo the Wanderer, a dim-witted but well-meaning warrior-ubermensch -- Don Quixote's benign cluelessness matched with Conan the Barbarian's brawny bloodlust -- created with his frequent collaborator, Mark Evanier. And he's been tapped by Matt Groening to provide the entire contents as well as the cover art for the 50th issue of Bart Simpson Comics, due in October.
