MADness #7- 50 Worst Things About Sports!

Each Monday I’m doing an installment of a complete, chronological look at every job I did for MAD over my 20 year run for the magazine, complete with whatever stories, anecdotes, or milestones, might apply along with the full article.

My next job for MAD was a seven pager called “MAD‘s 50 Worst Things About Sports” written by my CLAPTRAP cohort Desmond Devlin for MAD #408, Aug 2001. This piece was my longest so far for the magazine, and the second that was considered the “lead” feature… meaning the cover was a tease for this particular article. Of course I did not know that at the time. You find that out when you get a copy of the issue.

The “MAD‘s 50 Worst Things About…” was an ongoing feature they did annually in the August or September issue starting with “MAD‘s 50 Worst things About TV” in MAD #396, Aug 2000 through “MAD‘s 50 Worst Things About Video Games” in MAD #482, Oct 2007, and then sporadically over the next 4 years. They all featured a bunch of spot illustrations of individual gags. I did a couple of spots along with other artists for some of the later “50 Worst” features, but this is the only one I did solo.

This was also the first job I did for MAD that had to do with sports. I must have done something right, because I would go on to do nine other sports-centric jobs for them, most of which were over the next few years after this one.

One fun thing about this piece was that, while there were plenty of caricatures throughout, a fair number of the spots were just gags with generic people or images. That leaves the humor up to the action and expression without the need to get a likeness as well. I don’t have the original script for this piece anymore but I am pretty sure the “Trojan Stadium” joke on the bottom right of the above page was my gag.

I remember having a lot of fun with this one. I had just gotten done doing two “continuities” (i.e. movie/TV parodies) in a row, and while I loved doing those there is something to be said for doing stand-alone spot illustrations each delivering a single gag. It’s a more concentrated from of storytelling

Sadly this is one of the pieces I did early on for MAD where all the original digital files are lost. I have a few jobs from the early 2000’s where for whatever reason the images disappeared from my hard drive. These are scans from the printed pages.

Toon in next week for another thrilling tale of my 8th MAD appearance, a return to the world of movie parodies where Des Devlin and I take the mickey out of “Tomb Raider”.