MADness #122! A Trump Two-fer!

Ah… Monday. The start of a new week, with all the hopes and possibilities it represents! Sorry to bring it all crashing down in a cascade of idiocy, but it’s once again time for another step along the path of our look back at my work for MAD Magazine. This week features not one but two politically themed pieces, both with uncredited writers meaning they were written by the MAD staff, which appeared in MAD #547, Oct 2017.

The first in this issue was a quick single panel that was part of “The Trumpalini Pages”, a recent offshoot of the by then fairly long running “The Fundalini Pages”. “The Fundalini Pages” was a feature that, starting with #438  (Feb 2004), opened every issue and contained short gag features with single spot illustrations or that were copy only. It usually went three to five pages and had anywhere from six to eighteen mini-features. With issue #545 (June 2017) “The Trumpalini Pages” became a second version with same feature format, but with all the gags centered around Trump. This only lasted for a few issues. “The Fundalini Pages” made it until the final NYC issue. But I digress.

Here’s the “Trumpalini” spot I did for #547 (mercifully devoid of featuring Trump himself):

Here’s the pencil for this one:

Not much to that. As with most “Fundalini” list type features I needed to illustrate one of the gags on the list. Sometimes the MAD editors asked me to do a specific one, and sometimes they let me decide. I don’t remember which applied to this one but I did the last gag.

The bigger piece in this issue was a two page spread centered around then recently released infamous “Comey Memos”. My initial pencil had Comey on the left and Trump on the right:

But the MAD staff wanted me to flip the orientation:

This was a good call on their part. It’s always better to let the direction of the image lead into the subject of the image, which usually means having that subject on the right since in english we read left to right. I did have to do a little tweaking of the faces because you can’t just switch to a mirror image of a face and expect it to look right. Not too many changes needed though… they are pretty subtle.

That’s it for this week’s Monday MADness. Toon in next week for another episode, this one featuring my second MAD cover and is, along with the feature I did the art for inside, my favorite of all the stuff I’ve ever done for the magazine.