PROFILE : Cartoonist Has Been on Cutting Edge for 30 Years : Sergio Aragones of MAD magazine does his work in the margins. The Ojai resident is being featured in a show at Oxnard’s Carnegie Art Museum.

In his own deceptively small way, Sergio Aragones has taken the cartoon world by storm by sneaking around in the periphery. Aragones is best known for the work he does, quite literally, in the margins.

Each month, Aragones graces the pages--to be specific, the edges of the pages--of MAD magazine with clever visual gags that are tiny but pack a wallop. Many of his fans seek out the marginal cartoons before anything else in the magazine.

Aragones has lived quietly with his family in Ojai for a decade, each month sending in packages of 30-odd cartoons to the New York-based MAD. Making a rare public showing in his home county this fall, he is being featured prominently in the current show at the Carnegie Art Museum in Oxnard, “Humor in the Jugular Vein: The Art, Artists and Artifacts of MAD Magazine.”

Considering his love of minutia, it’s not surprising to find in his studio in downtown Ojai a mad curio collection. It’s a huge, cluttered space, but purposefully cluttered--chockablock with knickknacks, toys, books and other things you might expect.

The studio is a treasure trove of marginalia, including a tall plastic RCA Nipper dog, a pinball machine (“If I make 6,000,” he said, grinning, “I go home”), a collection of comic characters and a Betty Boop doll. Aragones is a classic case of what could be coined an “etceteraist.”

In conversation, too, the tall, mustachioed artist flits about adroitly and amiably in his inflected English, on subjects high and low.

As the visitor admired his collection of Donald Duck figures, the unpretentious Aragones shrugged: “It’s more of an accumulation of Donald Ducks. Every time I go to a swap meet I buy one. It’s not like I buy them in an antique shop or collector shops. I buy new ones from Toys R Us or from garage sales. Doing that for 30 years, it all adds up,” he laughs.

Aragones recently returned from a trip to Australia, to celebrate the 15th anniversary of the Australian edition of MAD.

Call it arrested development or carefully sustained innocence, but Aragones’ life work has refused to grow up in public. Aragones commented: “I guess when you’re young, you can laugh with impunity. If you’re an adult, you’re being childish. If you’re an adult, you think, ‘Oh, I cannot laugh in public . . .’ It’s a shame.”

Now, he can boast a cross-generational base of fans. “Some people are my age and they started reading it as kids, and their kids are now in their 30s, and their kids read it, so it’s three generations now.”

Born in Spain in 1937, Aragones and his family moved to Mexico during the Spanish Civil War. He drew avidly through school, including his four years at architecture school at the University of Mexico, and also worked as a clown and in the Mexican film industry. Eyeing a career as a cartoonist, Aragones moved to New York in 1962, beginning an association with MAD that has gone on uninterrupted for three decades.

“I went to MAD mainly just to meet them, because it was a satire magazine, and I didn’t do satire. I did gags. They put it together. I had so many ideas and I had to put them someplace. I decided ‘Well, if I put them in the corners and they like them . . .’

“When I did that, they thought that it could not be done, without words and in that size. But that’s what I did, with prolific ideas. They liked it. They got very good mail. I’ve never missed an issue in 30 years. Thinking of gags, it’s like walking.”

Sitting at his drawing board, he grabs a piece of paper and starts calculating the number of marginals he’s had published so far--over 7,500. He ponders a moment, and says in understatement, “That’s a lot of gags.”

In addition to the marginals, Aragones does regular subject-oriented cartoon features under the heading of “MAD Looks at . . .” He also has been working on satirical super hero comic books, “Groo,” and his newest creation, “Magnor.”

Despite his heavy workload, Aragones sees no end of cartoon possibilities. “You can take any subject and find whatever is absurd in it. That’s why ideas can never end. When I’m thinking of gags, I’ll think of any subject, and then think of the most stupid thing that could happen there. That happens in the weirdest places.

“I go to the Ventura Marina and sit in a coffeehouse and drink my coffee and look at boats. I cannot think here. Here, I draw. Here, there is so much I have to do.”

Aragones was first introduced to Ojai, like many residents, when he came to hear the late Krishnamurti speak. Before long, he had settled here. “We’ve been here 10 years, and I love it. After the first wave of people asking questions, it got very normal. People say hello. You’re friends with everyone here. The post office calls when you have Express Mail.”

One of the distinctions with Aragones’ cartoons is their timelessness and universality, compared to the more topical parodies that MAD specializes in.

“The subjects I pick--except when I do, say, ‘Jurassic Park’--they’ll be forever. I try to think of guys who are not all-American, but that work all over. The editions go to every country. And the fact that it’s not happening in this moment, it can be read at any time. So the laughs will last longer.”

While enjoying a healthy cult status among aficionados, Aragones is accustomed to the stigma faced by cartoonists in America. “In Europe, people still buy humor. My comics do well. They present them in a better way than they do here, with hard covers. Comic books are on a much higher strata of class than here.

“In Europe, we are stars. In Japan, we are superstars. People in the street bow to you. Here, people think, ‘Oh, he’s just a cartoonist,’ ” he laughs. “But that’s all right.

“I’m not a star,” he reasoned. “I’m a character actor. I’m always there. It’s like with an actor where people say ‘I’ve seen him, who is he?’ They don’t know me, they know my work.”

As he stood on the balcony outside his studio, a young man walking by yells up at the famous cartoonist and everyday Ojai-an, “Ola!”

“Hey!” he yells back, a neighborly sort emerging momentarily from the margins.

Details

* WHAT: “Humor in Jugular Vein: The Art, Artists and Artifacts of MAD Magazine”

* WHEN: Through Jan. 9

* WHERE: Carnegie Art Museum, 424 S. C St. in Oxnard

* FYI: 385-8157