Mailbag
December 6th, 2020 | Posted in Mailbag
Today’s mailbag is a series of questions about Desmond Devlin and my upcoming book of movie parodies: Q: Now that the project CLAPTRAP is funded, I’m curious to know when You and Des started the process? When did Desmond actually start writing the script for Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker the spoof? A: Des and I first started talking about doing something like this back in the early summer of 2019, when MAD told us they were cutting new content in the magazine down to about 20% in each issue, and that movie/TV spoofs would NOT be part of any new content. We discussed… READ MORE
November 29th, 2020 | Posted in Mailbag
Q: I think it’s safe to say that caricature is a central part of your illustration career. What caused you to chose that as a focus? A: I sort of stumbled into it actually. Caricature was something I never really consciously tried to do until I got a summer job drawing caricatures at a theme park after my first year of college. It was during that summer of 1985 that I really fell in love with the art form. It’s not like I hadn’t done it before. I just didn’t really connect the term “caricature” with what I did. I drew funny pictures of my… READ MORE
November 22nd, 2020 | Posted in Mailbag
Q: While at MAD, you always received boards with the word balloons already configured. Now with CLAPTRAP, you get scripts directly from Desmond and I assume the laying out of those balloons falls into your hands. I’m curious how you find that new responsibility? A: MAD‘s art staff always did the “mechanicals” as they called them for the parodies I drew, although I only received them on actual art boards for the first year or so I worked for the magazine. Ah, those were the days! In fact, the first few parodies I did not only did MAD send me the art boards with the… READ MORE
November 15th, 2020 | Posted in Mailbag
Q: Did you have the chance to meet Don Martin? He was a bit of a hero of mine when I was a kid in the seventies. Have you met many of the earlier “Usual Gang of Idiots”? A: Don Martin was also one of my favorites as a kid reading MAD in the 70’s! Sadly, no, I never got to meet him. He left MAD in 1987, so he was long gone by the time I started with MAD. In fact, he passed away in early 2000, just a few months before I got my first MAD assignment. A number of the Usual Gang… READ MORE
November 8th, 2020 | Posted in Mailbag
Q: What is your daily routine like as an entrepreneur? For example, do you work on the illustration part of your business in the morning and blog/mail out orders, and other business tasks in the afternoon? I suppose it varies if you have a quick deadline that comes up out of the blue. Just curious how you plan out/schedule your day to be the most productive yet give yourself time to exercise and hang with your family? A: The great thing about working from home is you don’t have to go anywhere, you are always in the office. The bad thing about working at home… READ MORE
November 1st, 2020 | Posted in Mailbag
Q: I’m really excited about your Claptrap project. I’m curious to hear more about how you and Desmond decided on which films to parody. I’m sure it was very collaborative, but, was there an instance where you each had at least one movie you absolutely wanted to do and asked the other to include? A: When Des and I started putting this together, “Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker” was always the first one we were going to do. That was a total no brainer, since it was the ONLY major Star Wars movie MAD would not have done a spoof of. So that one… READ MORE
October 25th, 2020 | Posted in MAD Magazine
Q: What were some of your favorite MAD parodies to work on? A: I am a big Batman fan so the parodies I did one of the three Christopher Nolan movies are definitely at the top of that list: As far as TV shows, I loved doing Mad Men, Breaking Bad and Stranger Things. There were only a handful of movie/TV parodies I disliked doing. Most of the time these were the funnest, best projects to work on not matter the subject. Thanks to Minebot45 (via Reddit) for the question. If you have a question you want answered for the mailbag about cartooning, illustration, MAD Magazine, caricature or similar, e-mail… READ MORE
October 4th, 2020 | Posted in Mailbag
Q: Besides “The Rise of Skywalker”, what other movies are you planning on doing parodies of in your book? A: By “book”, do you mean CLAPTRAP, the book of movie parodies MAD writer Desmond Devlin and I are currently shamelessly crowdfunding on IndieGoGo? I thought so. Right now we are planning to do ten full length movie parodies, with some extra movie related gag features in between. However if we reach our funding goal we will have stretch goals that will add up to two more full-length spoofs for a possible total of twelve. We have several classic movies already picked out (in fact Des… READ MORE
