MADness #132: Aquaman!

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What? Another Monday?!? As if the end of the weekend was not bad enough, here comes another step on the rapidly dwindling road that was my work for MAD Magazine! This week was look back as what for a number of years seemed like it would be the final full movie parody to appear in MAD. I’m talking about MAD’s spoof of “Aquaman” from MAD #7 (June 2019) written by my CLAPTRAP cohort Desmond Devlin.

The reason this seemed this one might be the curtain call for MAD movie parodies is that it was at this point in the MAD timeline, February of 2019, that everything started falling apart with the magazine. Up until then everything was going along just fine. In fact circulation had gone UP for the first time in many years, and there was generally a lot of positive opinions about the reboot. Then suddenly DC started firing people from all across their staff, including MAD “V.P. and Executive Editor” Bill Morrison. A few months later it was announced that MAD was going to stop newsstand distribution and reduce the amount of original content in each issue in favor of reprinted content. There were no details as to how much original content versus reprinted material would be in each issue, but I was told one of the things they were definitely NOT going to have anymore would be movie or TV parodies. It was the beginning of the end. We knew nothing about all that as the time I was doing this piece. Bill had just been fired when I got the assignment, and all the rest of it came later.

Frankly I consider this one of the worst art jobs I ever did on a MAD movie parody. The splash page turned out well but the four story pages were rushed and sub-par in my opinion. I don’t remember if I was given a really short deadline, or if I had other stuff bogging me down, or what the reason was. The inks were rushed and the color done almost overnight. All I know is I didn’t much like how the art turned out.

Actually I think a big part of it was that I was so discouraged about what was going on at DC and how little they obviously gave a shit about MAD, or seemingly any of their comics, that it was hard to muster any enthusiasm for this job. The original of that splash page was in the Norman Rockwell Museum show this summer, but I wouldn’t have included any of the other pages from this one.

I was happy when Des and I ended up doing a spoof of “The Batman” a few years later for the 70th anniversary issue, so this one would not end up being the last official MAD movie parody. The art I did for “The Batman” parody is much more up to my usual standards, IMO.

That’s it for anther Monday MADness! Toon in next week for what some people might argue is also a MAD movie parody, but they’d be wrong!