MADness #127: Xander & Kam’s Sneaky Previews!

Here we go with another moronic edition of Monday MADness, where we look back at my work for MAD Magazine. We are no on the second issue of the “new” MAD that had recently relocated to Burbank, CA in early 2018 with new VP of Editorial Bill Morrison and art director Suzy Hutchinson. This job was another throwback to an earlier concept MAD had done a few times… a single feature that incorporated several mini movie parodies in a sequence narrated by a movie critic. This updated concept was a play on social media/YouTube “content creators” who theater hop between films doing reviews without paying for tickets to each. “Xander and Kam” are not based on anybody, they are just fictional YouTubers. This was written by Ian Boothby, and appeared in MAD #2, Aug 2018.

If I remember right some of these movies where still in theaters when we did the feature, but it’s no where near as labor intensive to do these three or four panel “parodies” as it is doing a full blown one, so we could get this on the stands a lot faster.

I also remember I was really sick when I was working on this one, and I got way behind. The first two pages were roughed out pretty well, but then I had to do some really quick super roughs to get them to Suzy for review as the deadline was looming.

I wasn’t really sold on the mini-parody thing but I enjoyed doing this one, and a second one of the same nature a few issues down the road. I was able to have more fun with the gags and not have to be so concerned about capturing the look of specific scenes from the films. These are not so much parodies as a gag or two using the characters or situations from each film.

The other day I did a talk about movie parodies at the Lakes International Comic Art Festival in the UK, and I mentioned that  Des and I did a spoof of “Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker” in CLAPTRAP because it was the only Star Wars theatrically released live action film that MAD had NOT spoofed, as they stopped doing new stuff right before the movie came out. Afterward I was thinking I forgot about “Solo: A Star Wars Story” (actually I think most of us have forgotten about that movie…for good reason). Then I remembered this little one, so I guess it counts.

Now those are some ROUGH roughs.

I can’t remember why the last page was roughed out more completely than the previous three. I think it was because we had some revisions to do on the script and gags, so I needed to redo some panels and I just tightened up the whole page. Regardless I really mangled Ryan Reynold‘s nose.

That’s it for another Monday MADness! Toon in next week for a look at MAD‘s spoof of “Ready Player One”!