MADness #126: Star Wars: The Last Jedi!

Well kids, we are now in to the last days of MAD on our excruciatingly long journey through my work with the magazine. At this point in our timeline (early 2018) the New York version of MAD has packed up their veeblefetzers and rode off into the sunset, and the Burbank staff has fired up their poiuyts and started over with a brand new MAD #1. I did the art for not one but TWO full length parodies, one of a movie and one of a TV show (with a little throwback fun thrown in). The first feature that I did that appeared in MAD #1 was this spoof of “Star Wars: The Last Jedi”, written by my CLAPTRAP collaborator Desmond Devlin.

This was the first spoof I did for the “new” MAD, now working with art director Suzy Hutchinson and VP/Executive Director Bill Morrison. The Burbank MAD team wanted to keep the essential elements of MAD intact but also “update” things where they could. One of the things they did was to change the word boxes used in the movie/TV parodies from square corners to rounded corners. This to me seemed like change just for change sake, which was pointless IMO.

This was a real pain in the ass for me, because I draw and ink the word boxes in all my parodie as opposed to having them added digitally later. Why? Because I don’t want to waste my time drawing, inking, and coloring all the areas that those word boxes would cover up in the story. I also don’t want to limit myself to simplified backgrounds all the time. Inking the rounded corners took a lot more time since I had to use circle templates with my tech pen, trying to line them up properly with the straight edges of each box, and then extensively use the inevitable white-out when I didn’t get them exactly right (more often than not).

I was teaching a workshop in Atlanta shortly after this rounded corner thing started and complained about it to my class when I was talking about the nuts and bolts of doing movie parodies for MAD. One of my students was Jeff Knurek, the cartoonist for the daily syndicated comic puzzle feature “The Jumble”. Jeff is a terrific cartoonist and also a designer, inventor, and all around great guy. He told me he had a 3-d printer and if I sent him a sample of the size of the rounded corners that I ink on my original art, he could make me a custom template. A few weeks after the class I got a box in the mail from him containing these custom rounded corner templates:

Complete with MAD logo! This made doing the corners a breeze! I try to remember to thank him every time I see him.

This would turn out to be the last Star Wars movie spoof to appear in MAD. They had done them all (except “Solo: A Star Wars Story” which few want to claim ever existed). Des and I would complete the “Trilogy of Trilogies” ourselves in CLAPTRAP with our parody of “The Rise of Skywalker”.

Note the corners on our CLAPTRAP spoof are NOT rounded. That is of course just the splash page. There are SEVEN more pages of this parody! We not only had no rounded corners in CLAPTRAP, we also had no editors.

That’s it for another miserable Monday MADness… we are getting towards the end of the line. But first, we have another full parody I did the art for in this same issue! Toon in next week for what I think was one of the most fun jobs I ever did for the magazine.