When I went to visit the Slow Poisoner at his apartment near Divisadero Street earlier this summer, I made sure at least a few people knew where I was going. I’d never met Poisoner — better known to his friends and relations as Andrew Goldfarb — but I didn’t take any chances given his creepy, kooky output and his mysterious, spooky nom de plume.
Turns out, Goldfarb is a sweetheart, even if that heart is dark, arrhythmic, and probably made out of Papier-mâché, like so many of the apartment’s details. Goldfarb is a cartoonist; a musician; the host of a warped kids’ show co-starring his homemade golem Ook; and, the thing that drew me to his apartment in the first place, editor and publisher of a semi-annual magazine called Freaky.
Goldfarb calls Freaky “America’s #3 Humor Magazine,” presumably placing it after The Onion and Bari Weiss’ Free Press, which never fails to make me LOL. Each issue is an eye-assaulting, brain-rotting mix of comics, parodies, and fumetti (a mishmash of comics and photography). If you grew up reading MAD (or believing you’d edit it one day like me), Freaky will feel like a letter from an old friend.
Goldfarb is a rare thing in 2025: a weirdo who makes weird stuff by hand for other weirdos. In our AI-besotted, clout-chasing, ever more expensive city, that makes him very weird indeed. Now 56, he grew up in Silicon Valley, where he was the kind of kid who immediately got the blame when someone spray-painted a skull on a wall in his high school. “Everybody just assumed it was me,” he told me. “It wasn’t bad, but it just wasn’t me.”
“I would say I’m now fully expressing the germ of an identity that I had at that time,” he said in a drawling, hipster patter that recalls Lenny Bruce. “I’ve got the resources, the space, the time, the know-how at this point to do that. So, if I want to make a giant hand” — here, he gestures at the enormous four-digit Papier-mâché hand rising up in the corner of his living room — “I can. And that, to me, is all I ever really sought to do in life. You know, have a giant hand if I wanted one.”
Around the time MAD stopped soliciting new work and went more or less all-reprints, Goldfarb decided that in addition to a giant hand, he wanted his own magazine. Printed on cheap newsprint (which, counterintuitively, is more expensive than glossy paper), Freaky is a fever dream of gags, good-natured grossouts, and grownups channeling their inner snot-nosed punks. Goldfarb publishes a new issue every 8 months (“because that will keep me sane”) and personally delivers many of the 1,000 copies he prints to independent bookstores around the city or puts them in the mail for shops as far away as France and to subscribers all over the world.
He is now up to issue 12, which sports a cover of his green, bulging-eyed mascot F. Freaknik, Esq. on the toilet reading a copy of Freaky issue 12 showing a smaller Freaknik on the can reading issue 12… a nod to MAD’s signature use of the recursive Droste effect. There’s also a page of cartoons by a nine-year-old kid and a see-through gag page that takes full advantage of the magazine’s thin paper. Chaotic though it seems, this is a very thought-out publication. At $5 a copy, it’s a cheap thrill. (“I could raise it,” he said. “Have I figured out the math here? You might be pointing something out.”)
Like many artists, Goldfarb has been thinking a lot about AI lately. That page of cartoons by the nine-year-old kid faces another with some kind of human anatomy ductwork system in a style that can be described as H.R. Giger-meets-steam punk credited to an artist named Ken Heidenreich, who created it using AI tools. “This is something that I want to do as my little statement to the world,” Goldfarb told me. “Like, Here’s AI and here's kid’s art: How do you feel about that?”
Personally, I feel pretty bad about AI, especially when it comes to the creation of magazines. Goldfarb, however, quips that he’s “into the whole dystopia thing” and sees a light at the end of the slop tunnel we’re all in.
“This is a weird time we're in. Like deeply, deeply troublingly terrifying,” he said. “For artists, it’s a challenge and I think challenges are good. I think it’s going to work out just fine.”
