Born in
Brooklyn,
New York, Edwing began drawing at age nine. He started making the rounds with his cartoons after leaving the navy in 1958, receiving $5 for his first sale in 1960. His 49-year tenure with
Mad spanned six decades, beginning with his first two gag cartoons for the magazine: an installment of the recurring "Scenes We'd Like to See" feature and a sequence called "Nuclear Jitters," both from
Mad #70 (April 1962). His last piece appeared in the 515th issue in 2012. Before drawing his own cartoons, Edwing was the uncredited writer for many of
Don Martin's cartoon gags. During Don Martin's final decade with
Mad, Edwing began receiving a writer's byline for many of Martin's cartoons, as well as new material from Martin's paperback books. An example from 1986 is "Early One Evening In Las Vegas," in which a man finds that the only way to summon the fire department is to put a dollar bill in an alarm box which is built like a gambler's slot machine. With the exception of a single page of art in 1975, Edwing was exclusively a writer at
Mad for more than a dozen years before becoming an occasional illustrative contributor in the early 1980s. After Martin left
Mad in late 1987, Edwing effectively replaced him as the magazine's one-page gag cartoonist. Following Martin's death in 2000, Edwing was asked about their working relationship: :Martin and I corresponded mostly with phone calls. The
Mad editors did all the work by putting us together. I merely cheered Don up on a daily basis by telling him jokes, which had nothing to do with the work in front of him. I marveled at how he would take my chicken scratch sketches of a gag and transform them into a 2-D, animated, spectacular scene. The man was a major talent... l miss him. ==Other work==