MADness #123: Stranger Things!

Clicky to Embiggen…

Here we go with another ridiculous look back at my work for MAD Magazine! We are getting very close to the end of the New York MAD run… only two more issues after this one, MAD #548, which featured Desmond Devlin and my spoof of “Stranger Things” (I also did the cover, but that is for next week).

I did a lot of work for MAD over the almost 18 years to this point in the timeline, and I’d go on to do quite a bit more up until the end of new content, but I consider this issue the peak of my work for the magazine. It’s not the best art I ever did, but having done both the cover and the art for the cover’s subject, and both being among my better work, AND appearing in one of the final issues of the New York MAD era, this would be the issue I’d show someone if they asked to see my work for the magazine I only had one issue to show them.

I was very pleased to get this assignment because I had already been watching this show and really loved it. I was a kid about these kid’s ages in the early 80’s so the period details were very nostalgic, and the story was a lot of fun. By this time we knew the clock was running down on the NYC version of MAD, so getting to do both a cover and the cover feature for the old school gang was a treat.

There are two ways MAD would do a TV show spoof. One is where the writer creates his own episode of the show, and makes fun of the tropes, repetitive themes and other elements of the show. This approach is mostly for “stand alone” episodic show were each episode is a standalone story and there is very little overall story arc going on. The other way is more like how they do movies, by including key story moments and scenes encompassing an ongoing story that spans many episodes or full seasons. That’s how Desmond handled this one, quite appropriately.

Sharp eyed readers might notice that the top panel on the right page above (page 6 of the spoof) ended up with two mysterious people added to a table in the back of that panel in the final art. These are “The Duffer Brothers” i.e. Matt and Ross Duffer, the creators of the show, who the MAD staff insisted I draw into the spoof somewhere. I had already finished inking the splash page and the first few pages when I got that call, so I had a limited choice as to where to insert them unless I wanted to do major surgery to an already finished panel. This scene, which takes place at a wake, had not yet been inked so it was pretty easy to add them in. I think maybe the MAD editors thought we might get some social media love from the Duffers if they actually appeared in the spoof, but no one cared.

That’s just the first half of what I did for this issue. Toon in next week for the cover sotry!