MADness #8- Tomb Raider!

We continue our Monday MADness chronological crawl through my work for MAD with a look at my eighth appearance in the magazine, a parody of the 2001 film “Lara Croft: Tomb Raider” subtly titled “Lotta Crotch: Bazoom Raider”, written by Desmond Devlin and appearing in MAD #410, Oct 2001.

This movie was of course based on the popular video game, and starred a young Angelina Jolie in the title role. Her casting was criticized by video game fanboys mainly because they didn’t think she had big enough breasts to play the famously chesty Lara Croft. That is, of course, ridiculous considering this was a fictional video game character that has impossibly huge boobs just to appeal to the pubescent gamer boys. It was rumored that Jolie wore padded bras to have a bigger chest in the film. As a result, I did a running gag about fake boobs and drew her chest ridiculously big throughout the spoof. In fact both Des in his writing and I in the art constantly made fun of the fact that the size of Jolie’s breasts were of such importance to anybody.

There were two things I remember about this job. The first had to do with the page you see above. When I turned it in, art director Sam Viviano gave me this advice from cartooning 101: “you never use the word ‘flick’ as a sound effect in comics.” This is apparently a bit of age old comics institutional wisdom. I think the reason sort of speaks for itself here in the untouched original art:

Yeeeeeah… I don’t think that would have read well shrunk down. Sam pointed this out and then digitally adjusted the letter spacing in the final to make sure it was clearly “FLICK” not “FUCK”. I am not sure Sam believed me when I told him I had no idea about this comic book “rule”, since it was apparently a well known and kind of famous thing. He might have thought I was trying to pull something on them. I swear I’d never heard that before, however.

The other thing about this job was that I was getting very frustrated with my inking at this point in my career. Frankly I’d hardly done and real inking up to the point where I started trying to get into MAD, and I felt it was holding back my work.

Sam was kind enough to agree to give me a private workshop on inking at his studio in NYC (I paid him for it, but doing it for any price was mighty generous of him). I brought along a second penciled version of one of these pages, which I worked on a bit with his supervision in between watching him ink and then watercolor a piece. I learned a lot that weekend. Here’s the piece Sam did as the demo:

I applied all the stuff I learned that weekend to my work going forward, and it helped me immensely. So, thank you Sam!

This was also the job where I really felt that I was going to be a regular part of MAD going forward. I had been is every other issue for a couple of months now, and this was my second movie parody, and third overall “continuity” job. That’s a pretty solid amount of contributing.

Toon in next week for the riveting tale of my ninth job for MAD, another sports-centric feature called “The Mysterious Mysteries of Televised Sports”!