Since the dawn of “Weird Al” Yankovic, he’s been popping up in film and television cameos with alarming regularity. Those appearances are often stitched together into montages during his live concerts, but one corner of this pop-culture history doesn’t translate quite as easily to the big screen above the stage: the 40 years he’s spent wandering through the pages of comic books and magazines.
Inspired by my own comic collection, including DC’s newest Weird Al release and the 2016 Spider-Man/Deadpool issue, I decided to dig through the internet content mines and see how many of Al’s comic-book and zine appearances I could find.
July 1986 – MAD #264, MAD’s Pro Wrestling Predictions
Written by J. Prete; art by Angelo Torres.
Weird Al appears in an illustrated wrestling match.
October 1986 – MAD #266, MAD’s Cable TV Roulette
Written by Mike Snider.
A photograph appears during a spoof of channel surfing.
September 1987 – MAD #273, Celebrities in Space
Written by Frank Jacobs; art by Mort Drucker.
Weird Al gets his own segment that imagines his adventures in space.
April 1991 – Disney Adventures, Vol. 1, No. 6, Weird Al’s Wacky World
Weird Al appears on the cover with Launchpad McQuack and is featured inside with a photo Q&A.
December 1991 – X-Factor #73, Crowd Control
Marvel Comics. Written by Peter David; pencils by Larry Stroman; inks by Al Milgrom.
Weird Al’s first reference in Marvel Comics. Weird Al is overheard on the radio as the creator of a fictional all-mutant parody album. The comic plays his “Multiple Man,” a parody of They Might Be Giants’ “Particle Man.”
January 1993 – Disney Adventures, Vol. 3, Weird Al Yankovic in “Captian Ee-I-Ee-I-Oh”
Written by Heidi MacDonald; pencils by Bruce Morrill; inks by Steve Mitchell.
Weird Al stars as the captain of a spacecraft in a comic that combines photographs of Al with traditional comic artwork.
September 1997 – Pinky and the Brain #15, Hades Ladies
DC Comics. Written by Jesse Leon McCann; pencils by Walter Carzon; inks by Mike DeCarlo.
May 2011 – Accordion Theory
Written by Jeff McClelland; art by Adrian “Bago” Gonzalez.
The short webcomic casts Weird Al as a potential escape pod companion.
June 2015 – MAD #533, Guest Editor Weird Al Takes Over!
Guest edited by “Weird Al” Yankovic; cover art by Mark Fredrickson.
This issue also features “MAD’s Tom Bunk Visits a Weird Al Concert,” written and illustrated by Tom Bunk.
January 2016 – FUBAR, All the King’s Corpses, “Eat It”
Written by Jeff McClelland; pencils by Jeff McComsey; inks by Jim McMunn.
Weird Al stars in a short zombie story.
June 2016 – Spider-Man/Deadpool #6, Number One on the Maul Sheet!
Written by Scott Aukerman; pencils by Reilly Brown; inks by Rick Magyar, Le Beau Underwood, and Scott Hanna.
Weird Al makes an illustrated cameo when Spider-Man and Deadpool crash through the set of the Comedy Bang! Bang! television series.
August 2019 – Teen Titans Go! #71, Power Brokers
Written by Ivan Cohen; art by Sandy Jarrell.
Weird Al pops in quick to ask Robin if he likes free comedy.
December 2022 – MAD #28, Weird Al Loves Wacky Al Jaffee
Written by “Weird Al” Yankovic; art by Ed Steckley.
Al contributes a personal one-page tribute to legendary MAD cartoonist Al Jaffee.
January 2023 – The Illustrated Al: The Songs of “Weird Al” Yankovic
Written by “Weird Al” Yankovic; foreword by Emo Philips; art by numerous cartoonists and illustrators.
The full-length graphic novel features illustrations of more than 20 Weird Al songs.
April 2026 – Batman/Superman, World’s Finest #50, Weird Al Variants
DC comics. Variant covers by Dan Mora.
Weird Al isn’t featured within the pages, but he managed to find some good friends to hang out with for these variant covers.
September 2026 – Batman/Superman/Weird Al #1, World’s Weirdest
DC comics. Written by Mark Waid; pencils by Dan Schoening and Fico Ossio; inks by Luis Antonio Delgado.
Weird Al becomes a full-fledged title character, teaming up with Batman and Superman to save the world from becoming too boring.
I‘m sure the trenches of the internet could probably keep going, but for now, this feels like a good place to close. If you know of a Weird Al appearance I missed, send it my way.
Speaking of Weird Al art, swing by Milwaukee Record‘s Weird Al Week pop-up at Sugar Maple, where locally made Weird Al artwork is on display throughout the week and weekend alongside the rest of our Yankovic-related nonsense.
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