MISCONNECTED
Starting around 2007, I began a comic strip called Missed Connections, which ran on a weekly basis for about a year (30+ issues) in a widely-distributed NYC indie newspaper called the NYPress and eventually became a regular feature of MAD Magazine. The concept behind the strip was
a firsthand exploration of small real-life moments, odd juxtapositions of the urban landscape found in the everyday trek through the city, subway, internet, garbage, advertising, overheard snippets of conversation, graffiti and other outlier urban oddities.
My inspiration for the strip's creation came from the Missed Connections section of the newspaper, a place in which strangers might signal their romantic interest in someone they’d caught a passing glimpse of through the doors of a closing train or some such non-encounter that had stuck with them. What stuck with me was the idea of having such a strong desire to document a moment that felt like a profoundly important encounter, and I’d hoped to catch the non-romantic equivalence of this in my own Missed Connections cartoon.
The strip appeared sporadically in other publications including The Brooklyn Paper and Funny Times before eventually being picked up as a regular feature in MAD Magazine where it was renamed Samuel Ferri’s Misconnected Moments and ran with 3 different comics per issue starting in 2014 for several years until the magazine closed.
Some MAD moments...
Before MAD and before going digital for coloring processes, there was a phase in which all the strips were painted with acrylics and watercolors...
In the last two years, I've produced less of this series. Having a child in 2020 during the pandemic pulled my attention in other directions. But recently, I've begun to give it another look as the smoke settles and the missed connections of parenthood begin to reveal themselves...
