Monday MADness!- MAD en Francais!
The guys at MAD sent me a surprise the other day (it wasn’t a check… that really would have been a surprise). It was this hardcover Superman special printed, and presumably being sold in, France, with my cover illustration:
The inside contains mostly the same material as the MAD Presents Superman magazine special of this past summer, including my parody of Superman Returns. Everything is of course translated into French. It’s hard to scan the interior of a hardcover, but here is one of my pages translated:
Sadly, it’s no funnier in French.
MAD actually has a long tradition of not only being translated into other languages and having foreign editions, but actually having foreign versions of MAD that include some of the US material and some local material done by artists from that country. In fact, and I guess this proves there are websites devote to everything, there is a website devoted just to the foreign editions of MAD. There’s not a lot of specifics there, but you can see some covers and a blurb about the history of each.
There used to be a lot of foreign editions of MAD, but we are down to six that are currently in production. It must be a lot of work to translate the U.S. material into a completely different language, like they do every issue for the Australian edition (ba-da-bump…tish!)
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Amazing detailing. How did you do the horizontal texture?
The texture in Superman’s costume was done using a single image copied over and over to create the look. I personally think it flattens out and ruins the whole image, but I was running out of time after wasting days painting that cityscape and that was the best solution I could come up with given the time I had left. Had I to do it over again, I’d do a lot of things different.
Your quality standards are way higher than ours because to me it looks great. As far as the extremely detailed background, usually its done by a seperate team of background artists in studios, and the caricature or main figure is commissiond to brilliant artists like you… but since the whole scene is done by you alone i understand it might have eaten up considerable time.
As for the second part of my question that you omitted, since you didn’t disagree with me can i assume that you in part, or wholly agree with me.And deem it unfit to pass judgement on other artist. I’d respect that.
Thanks on first part, and you are exactly right on second part. Sorry about the edit.
Love your work Tom in any language!
Strewth bloody Crikey, cobber! Bloody tops mate!
Why won’t Google Translate work on this????
I bought it yesterday and will read it tomorrow. I’m very happy to read you in french ! I don’t speak very well english … I bought and read the “Mad art’s Caricature” and it was sometimes hard to understand texts for me ..!
Happy new year !