We are finally on to the stars of the most recent Doctor Who series! Here we have a quick study of the ninth Doctor, as portrayed by Christoper Eccleston.

The Lovely Anna and I are heading out shortly to attend the NCS Reuben Award Weekend in beautiful Pittsburgh, PA! I’ll have updates, pics and other goodness from the event later this week. The Reubens officially kick off on Friday, but as I am running the show I have to get in early and make sure the bourbon, scotch and gin are up to our famously cheap standards. Our flight actually leaves tomorrow morning, but we are getting to the airport this afternoon because the TSA lines are so long.

This week’s Monday MADness is another blast from the past… this time from MAD #400, December 2000. This was my second appearance in the magazine, and I was assigned the job of doing fake covers from each decade that MAD was in existence for an article entitles “The Untold History of MAD“. These printed really small in the article, so here they are about actual art size.

The 1950′s

The 1960′s

The 1970′s

The 1980′s

The 1990′s

These were described as a double cover issue printed the morning after Yelsin’s attempted coup of Russia, done is the manner of the Nixon/Kennedy double cover for MAD #60 where MAD hedges its bet as to who was going to come out on top:

Q: You’ve written here before that when you do a freelance job for a client, they technically aren’t buying artwork from you but the rights to use artwork. What kind of copyrights do they typically get?

A: Absolutely correct on that first part. While most freelance projects involve creating artwork specifically for a client’s needs, ultimately they are really paying for the copyrights to use that artwork for their purposes. At least, that’s the case in an independent contractor agreement. In a work for hire agreement, they are paying only for the artwork creation because they own every pencil line and the full copyrights to anything created for the job… but that’s another story.

It varies job to job, but “typically” a client buys the rights to use the artwork created for the project one time for that particular purpose. For a magazine, that’s usually means for that single issue. For an advertisement, that means for the duration of that particular ad campaign. For a book, it would mean for that single title and subsequent reprints. A freelance agreement should spell out the copyrights being transferred, so there is no mistaking what a client is getting. Some of the limitations that might be imposed would be geographic (north America only, for example), time used (perhaps one or two years), exclusivity, etc.

The web complicates matters, as usual. Since it’s entirely dynamic, only time limitations apply. I typically “throw in” web use for any publication illustrations I do these days, since every publication has a website and wants to use the illustration for either ads for subscriptions or for digital versions of the story.

In practice, most freelance jobs are for a specific purpose that is so specific use of the image beyond it’s original purpose is not really applicable anyway, but it’s always a good idea to have the rights spelled out in writing.

Thanks to R. Griffin for the question. If you have a question you want answered for the mailbag about cartooning, illustration, MAD Magazine, caricature or similar, e-mail me and I’ll try and answer it here.

I have also been exploring the possibility of selling Spanish language foreign rights to a company in Spain. They would then do a translation in Spanish and sell them directly. I will say this is unlikely to happen. They don’t seem very willing to pay a reasonable advance/royalty for these rights, and are not very forthcoming in details on the process of doing the translation. Maybe another company will be better. I get a fair number of inquiries about having the book translated, especially into Spanish, but the cost is prohibitive to do it via self-publishing. Hopefully this will end up working out, it would be cool to see the book in Spanish!