Mack Williams, animator – formerly of Archer, Frisky Dingo, Sealab 2021

I’ve known Mack Williams for about 13 years, and I’ve always been amazed by his design skills, and though I’ve never seen a full episode of Archer, he was one of the main contributors for the first few years of that FX show. During our chat, we discussed why people love Archer so much (hint: he said it’s the writing, not the animation), why people of a certain generation still are enamored of animated shows even after they’ve become grown-ups, what exactly the first years of Archer were like, and the logistics of how an episode is made. Plus, he talks about what it was like to meet his idol, Mad magazine co-founder Jack Davis.

And then …

We morph into a conversation about actual journalism where we discuss editorial cartoonists while lamenting the decline of artists who do that on a local level. Plus, we talk about his band, Attractive Eighties Women.

And just because, here are two Attractive Eighties Women videos.

Here is some of what we talked about (and some of what we didn’t).