MADness #132.5- The Lion King!

Hey now! I am really behind in posting these looks back at my work for MAD because I have switched the majority of my social media/interweb efforts to my FREE weekly newsletter. If you are still coming here for new content, you are looking in the wrong place. Subscribe to my newsletter here. Still, I’m almost at the end of the road for the work I have done for MAD, so I might as well finish up the series here.

Today we look at the second of two pieces I had in MAD #9 aka the “Tarantino Issue”. The cover and the spoof of the nonexistent TV show “Bounty Law” also in that issue you can see here. This second piece is a kind of sort of parody of Disney’s CGI remake of “The Lion King”, and was written by comedienne Akilah Hughes. I was never told how Akilah ended up writing a piece like this for MAD (this was her one and only contribution to the magazine) but I thought the script was very funny and clever.

This was not really a spoof of the movie, since we did it before the film did was released. Instead it is a sort of “behind the scenes” story that intersperses scenes from the film with scenes from the set. That required me to figure out how to differentiate between the “real” world and the CGI film footage. What I did was to do the panels from the film in my “colored line” technique. All that really means is rather than leaving the ink lines black like I usually do, I color them according to the color of the forms they define. For example, the lines around the lions in the opening page are a brown color, while the lines round the elephant are gray and ones around the parrot match the color of the feathers, etc. This plus a little more lush painting makes for a different look than the black line technique, which I used for the “real world” scenes.

Clicky any to embiggen…

The main focus of this piece is that Donald Glover is in pursuit of the fictional “KENTHPGOP”, a humorous spin on the EGOT which includes awards like the Kids’ Choice Award and the Pulitzer. Beyonce is portrayed as a mystical demigoddess dispensing advice to Glover. I thought it was a lot more interesting a take than to just do a straight movie spoof.

That’s it for another Monday MADness. Toon in again sometime soon for another two-for-one issue, with both a TV parody and another “Xander and Kam” movie review feature!