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Mort Todd – RIP

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D. D. Degg Published: August 27, 2025 Updated: August 30, 2025 1 minute 2 comments

Cartoonist, writer, editor, publisher Mort Todd (Michael Delle-Femine) has passed away.

Fandom Pulse has a brief look at Mort Todd’s comic book career:

On his professional accomplishments, Mort Todd became the youngest Editor-in-Chief of Cracked magazine in 1985, revitalizing the long-running humor publication. He recruited legendary artists like Don Martin away from Mad Magazine and helped launch the early careers of alternative comics talents such as Daniel Clowes and Peter Bagge. His innovative editorial approach brought new life to the magazine and strengthened its position as a key competitor in the satirical comics landscape.

Mort Todd [when asked about ComicFix]:
Well, I got asked by the New York Post to create some comic strips because Peanuts and all that stuff, they get licensed and they’re in every paper. They actually wanted to create some unique, comic strips that would be unique to their paper and I came up with three strips. It was actually the amount of work of four strips, because one of them was an interactive comic strip, it had two tiers instead of one. I was writing all three, doing layouts for all three, penciling for two of them?

Lettering and coloring and all that stuff. Because earlier too, I’d done a Rat Fink strip with big daddy Roth and we tried to get that going and it didn’t happen. For the Post, that’s why I created Comicfix but also I did other advertisement and junk but we did… I licensed Speed Racer. It’s Speed Racer Comic for a year and I created this strip called Celebrity Biografix which had celebrities and Severin drew that. John Severin drew it because who could draw celebrities better?

What that would be like, it would tell someone’s biography in three days and we usually based it on their birthday so it’d be somehow topical.

Then the other strip I did, and this was pulling back from the past of what they don’t do better earlier, is a strip called Molly the Model. Not Maley, but Molly because at the time, I was going with a model called Molly.

… it was an interactive comic strip, it was soap opera. We had three plot lines going on where it was, “What should Molly do? Should she do this? Should she do that? Should she do this? Fill in your own answer,” and they’d go to the New York Post website and vote. I usually, pretty much already planned on what was going to happen and usually, the people voted the way I steered them. I never had to rewrite anything too much and I don’t know, that might’ve been the very first and very last interactive daily comic strip.

From the September 11, 2000 New York Post:

“Molly the Model” strikes her first pose in The Post comics section on Page 52 today – and she’s not like the other animated girls.

Molly is the star of the world’s first-ever interactive newspaper comic strip, meaning Post readers can go online, at nypost.com, and vote to decide what happens to her.

“It’s something new and innovative that hasn’t been done before,” said the strip’s writer, former Cracked Magazine editor Mort Todd.

Mort Todd’s photos on his Facebook page has a wonderful gallery showcasing Mort’s creativity.

More at Mort Todd’s homesite.