Have You Mad Men-ed Yourself?

Dyna Moe, the illustrator behind the popular Mad Men Yourself app, speaks to Rachel Syme about drinking with Jon Hamm and other on-set secrets. Plus: a gallery of Mad Menned celebrities.

As AMC’s surprise hit show Mad Men launches its anticipated third season—and yes, it is still a surprise that a network known mostly for airing black-and-white movie reruns five years ago is now sweeping the Original Drama Emmys—the legions of Don Draper devotees with cable are finally getting what they’ve dreamed about all summer. And then there are the viewers who will be turning in for the first time—perhaps they were swayed by the posters or trailers, perhaps they’ve decided to give into the watercooler mob, or perhaps—and most likely—they learned about the show through the clever marketing app called Mad Men Yourself.

VIEW OUR GALLERY OF MAD MEN-ED CELEBRITIES

The network introduced the addictive online game last month—users can create vintage-looking cartoon avatars of themselves from dozens of templates, like paper dolls out of ‘60s New York. The craze for “Mad Menning” is now thoroughly established—Twitter icons and Facebook portraits have been switched to the drawings (and often back again, now that the trend has reached a tenuous critical mass). The fact that the show’s title has become an online meme—not to mention a new verb—is a testament to AMC’s marketing team.

But it is also a testament to Dyna Moe, the illustrator behind the Mad Men avatars. Moe’s drawings recall the kitschy advertisements of the late 1950s, the type of bold, mid-century graphic design that informs much of the show’s visual language. But even better than Moe’s spot-on drawings is the story behind them; the illustrator is now completely entrenched in the Mad Men universe, to the point where she will appear on the show as a secretary later this season. And all because of a few sketches jotted off during a particularly mind-numbing day at her advertising desk job.

Jon Hamm is “unexpectedly fratty. He’s kind of a dude. He wears a baseball cap all the time off set, buying people Jäger shots.”

Moe looks like a grown-up (and real-life) version of MTV’s Daria: cat-eye glasses, Mod Squad shift dress, heavy combat boots. She seems less like a Mad Men-era scholar and more like a student of ‘90s riot-grrrl rock, a fact she points out over diner coffee. “It’s funny because everyone thinks I’m this super fan,” Moe says. “But I’m really not. I love the show, I think it’s beautiful, but if Mad Men went off the air, I’d recover. And honestly, if I had to choose between never seeing another Mad Men or Law & Order, it would be really tough. Actual fanatics make me very nervous.”

It’s easy to see how one might mistake Moe for a Mad Men obsessive—before Mad Men Yourself, Moe gained Web notoriety for posting on Flickr her own illustrations inspired by episodes from the first two seasons. But the comedian (Moe has been performing and directing at the Upright Citizens Brigade for more than a decade), who never had any formal illustration training, came by Mad Men more organically than pure fandom. “I am friendly with Rich Sommer who plays Harry Crane on the show,” she says. “He knows I draw, so one day he asked me if I could make a Mad Men Christmas card for the cast during the first season. I was so bored at my day job that I spent months perfecting it.”