Mort Todd

Born November 9, 1961 An American writer and media entrepreneur, best known as an editor-in-chief of Cracked magazine, and later, Marvel Music. He is owner of Comicfix, a media company that has developed licensed properties. As a writer, artist or editor, Todd has worked at several comic book companies, contributing to characters including Superman and Spider-Man, and to licensed properties such as Barbie and Looney Tunes. His illustrations appear on CD covers, magazines, newspapers, and print advertisements. With Daniel Clowes, Pete Friedrich and Rick Altergott, Mort Todd contributed stories and art to Psycho Comics. He sold his first screenplay for a TV pilot called The Ultimates to a German production company while still a teenager. The pilot was produced, but never distributed, and stars a young Clowes as a teen rock 'n' roll superhero. Mort also wrote and penciled some stories for Clowes' Lloyd Llewellyn series from Fantagraphics. Around then he started freelancing for DC Comics, Marvel Comics, Kitchen Sink, Myron Fass, and many other smaller publishers. Since 1984, he illustrated all eight volumes of Back From The Grave (Crypt Records), a compilation series of obscure proto-punk rock from the 1960s. The original art to the cover of Volume One is on permanent display at the Cornell University Punk Archive Collection. In 1985, Todd became editor-in-chief of Cracked magazine. There he signed artist Don Martin after a 32-year career at Mad Magazine. Todd also published some of the earliest mainstream work of Altergott, Clowes, and Peter Bagge. For Globe Communications, Todd created the comics magazine Monsters Attack!, which featured horror comics and articles about movies. It ran five issues (Sept. 1989 - Dec. 1990), with Todd involved with the first four. Todd launched the imprint AAA, which published the first authorized collection of Bill Ward's pin-ups in W.O.W. (World of Ward). AAA also published a bilingual humor comic called Pepito with stories by writer George Gladir