MADness #128: Ready Player One!

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Welcome to another edition of Monday MADness, where we painstakingly slog through the work I did for MAD Magazine. This week we have a look at MAD‘s spoof of the film “Ready Player One”, written by my CLAPTRAP cohort Desmond Devlin and first appearing in MAD #3, Oct 2018.

This splash page took a long time to work out. This movie is kind of a MAD parody in itself. Dozens of cameos of pop culture icons and gaming characters and vehicles appear throughout the film. It was almost impossible to one up that without going totally over the top like this.

I took some major liberties with the story timeline on this splash. Des’s original script had this splash page scene take place in the commons area causeway of the virtual game world, the”Oasis”, and this race scene took place in a regular story panel on page three. Instead, I opened up the spoof in the middle of the race which is way more fun and interesting, and allowed me to have a lot more cameos and chicken fat for the race than I could have done in a small panel later. I only had to revise the visuals for the first panel of page 3… placing Wade in his van with his gear on mid-race.

If I remember right, there was a lot of tinkering that was done with this splash page layout and discussion about the spoof title logo. Because the logo is a stacked three lines, it had to be placed on one side of the gutter or the other, and it created composition challenges. There was a discussion about changing it to a single line so it opened up more room for the art between the word boxes, but keeping the look of the real logo in the spoof version is too important. The final layout had a big dead space in the upper right but I easily filled that with the Rudy Guiliani/King Kong gag. The end result was a dense and frenzied but (I think) nicely balanced composition.

Note we were still doing the stupid rounded corners on the word boxes. I recently learned I had MAD Design Director Doug Thompson to blame for coming up with that idea. That really was a pain in the ass for me to have to ink all those rounded corners, even with the handy template I had.

This was only the third issue I worked on with the new MAD team out in Burbank. Mostly they were easy to work with but it was kind of like starting over, because former art director Sam Viviano and I had an almost telepathic connection with these jobs where he could easily tell what I was trying to do with my pencils and recognized things like background gags I indicated even if they were barely chicken scratches in the roughs. New art director Suzy Hutchinson needed a clearer explanation of things like my thinking behind background gags, so I would include a “key” of each page for her:

• Panel 1: Hard to see but lower left is a rat with Oasis goggles on. I’ll add a bunch of garbage gags all around
• Panel 2: That’s the Flash in the background
• Panel 3: Fuzzy dice on the right
• Panel 4: Will try and add gag wrecked vehicles. It’s tough to come up with funny ones because the obvious chicken fat cameos are mostly in the actual film, so I need to come up with ones that no one would think anyone would use as a “cool” vehicle but are still recognizable like the Clampet’s truck from “Beverly Hillbillies”, which I used in the splash. Maybe the Munster’s jalopy, etc. Thinking.
• Panel 5: That’s the Thelma and Louise Thunderbird… thought that was appropriate.
• Panel 6: Again with thinking of really silly cameos as opposed to cool ones. Aech is assembling some legos

• Panel 1: Just realized I need to add blood on the front of the Delorian and maybe a busted up hand coming up from the front to sell the “picnicker’s” gag.
• Panel 4: Needs a gag as part of the desk clutter for these guys, probably on far left. Thinking about it.

That helped clarify things for her and the editorial staff. It also meant I would not “surprise” them with gags in the final art that might lead to revisions at that stage, which I try to avoid at all costs.

Here’s the roughs for the next two pages:

And my notes. I refer a lot to the script here but you get the idea:

Finally the last page:

and my notes:

I never did come up with a visual gag for that last panel. I thought about drawing them in bed together with him looking under the sheet (presumably at his junk) but that seemed too far off the actual end of the film. Also maybe too gratuitous. Anyway if I remember right this one was turned in almost at the very last second, so I think I just ran out of time. As they say in the business: “Completion not Perfection”.

That’s it for another Monday MADness! Toon in next week when we take a quick break from MAD proper and look at a side project I was doing for MAD at this same time. One that didn’t get published but was a great concept all the same.