MADness #9: Mysteries of Sports!

We continue our Monday MADness chronological crawl through my work for MAD with a look at my ninth piece for the magazine, a two page article called “The Mysterious Mysteries of Televised Sports”, written by my CLAPTRAP cohort Desmond Devlin for MAD #412, Dec 2001.

If you have been following along on Mondays, you may be noticing a trend here. Of the nine features I had so far illustrated for MAD, seven of them were written by Des. Some say it’s because no one else wanted to work on his lame scripts, but I suspect it’s because the guy was so prolific there was just a lot of Des material to go around. Des is by far the writer I most worked with at MAD. We collaborated on 44 total features over 20 years. The next closest for me was Dick DeBartolo with 21.

I’m kidding about the lame scripts, of course. Des’s writing was (as still is) sharp and funny, and he seemed to be able to take on any subject from movies and TV to politics to sports to music with both the insight of someone very familiar with the topic and with a very current tone. I guess I’d better stop with the compliments, or he’ll start demanding more than half of the CLAPTRAP dough.

This was my second sports related job for MAD, coming only two jobs after my first one. I would go on to do six total sports related articles over a two year and 26 issue span. In hindsight this was my “Sports Guy” period with MAD. This ended abruptly, as after that 6th sports job I only did two more sports related features for the magazine, one of which was just last year for Vol. 2 #14. Why I suddenly became the “sports guy” and just as suddenly stopped being that guy I do not know. I enjoyed doing the action sports figures, so it was fun while it lasted. Considering Jack Davis was arguably the “Sports Guy” for MAD for a long time, it’s good company to be in.

This is one of those jobs where the original digital files are lost, so I don’t have any notes or behind-the-scenes sketches to share. One thing I do remember about this job was that in contained what at the time was one of my favorite panels:

This was a damn funny gag by Des. When you get to illustrate a joke that really makes you laugh out loud, the visual translation is usually very vivid in your head. I remember liking how this one turned out and thought it was the strongest gag/panel in the spread.

Toon in next week for another edge-of-your-seat yarn about my tenth job for MAD, another TV show spoof, this time of a TV show you don’t remember ever existed!