MADness #126.5: Starchie/Riverdale!

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Welcome to another edition of Monday MADness, where we continue or seemingly endless trek through the dreck that was my work for MAD Magazine! Do not despair! Sadly, this dreck trek is far from endless, and we are starting to near the end. But first, we revisit the first issue of the MAD Magazine “reboot”, which was the first issue produced entirely by the new Burbank based staff and which featured not one but two full length spoofs with art by me. We took a look at the first one last week, a parody of “Star Wars: The Last Jedi” that appeared near the front of the magazine. Frankly that one was more or less a traditional MAD movie spoof. This one had a unique twist.

It was newly minted editor-in-chief Bill Morrison who had the idea for me to do the art for a “Riverdale” TV parody that would start out with an homage to the classic Bill Elder “Starchie” spoof of “Archie”comics from MAD #12 (June 1954), and would transition via time machine to modern day Riverdale and the actual TV show spoof. This would require closely copying the style of Elder’s original parody of the Dan DeCarlo Archie aesthetic for the opening segment. Here’s the original Bill Elder opening page from that 1954 classic:

The script was by Ian Boothby.

Elder’s work in MAD was brilliant, and I thought it would be a fun challenge to try and channel him for a few pages. I was right.

I used a brush like Elder did for much of the ink work, and added a lot of the goofy pun-based visual gags that were a hallmark of his work. In fact, the term “chicken fat” used for those types of background gags was coined by Elder.

Three pages of this homage stuff was just right as an into, I think. I loved this idea from Bill and it was a great start to the new MAD era.

After the Elder intro we move into the more traditional spoof of the TV show “Riverdale”. I liked Ian’s script a lot. It really leaned into the racy “updated” versions of the characters and the departures from the traditional storylines of the comics. Having Archie and Jughead be time travelers really made that work.

One thing I wanted to try to do with the second part of this spoof was to capture some of the Elder feel into the more realistic/caricature based art. I did this by using more exaggerated body language in the characters, and to be just a bit more cartoonish with the expressions and movements. I think it’s especially apparent in the two scenes on these pages with Betty and Veronica getting physical with Jughead and Archie. That’s basically Elder storytelling but with my more realistic caricature style:

That’s it for anther Monday MADness! Toon in next week for a look at my work in MAD #2 (the 2018 one, not the 1952 one).