MADness #132- Mary Poppins!

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Monday AGAIN?? Here we go with yet another step on the crooked path of mediocrity that was my work for MAD Magazine. This week we look back at a kinda-sorta movie parody (but not really) from MAD #6, written by Ian Boothby.

Pencils

This piece was done right as “Mary Poppins Returns” starring Emily Blunt and Lin-Manuel Miranda was released. It’s not a parody of the movie but an original story using the characters. That does not count as an actual movie parody of course. It’s a political feature.

I happen to have full scans of the final inks of this splash because I had the originals up for sale in the Studio Store. The titling and other graphic elements were pasted up as well, but that was just for the original art:

Inks

These kinds of mash-ups can be fun. I need not be too concerned with capturing the feel of the actual film, so it becomes an exercise in basic comic book storytelling… and a lot of caricatures.

When I shared some sneak peeks of this back when it was released, a reader asked this question about that last panel and the next couple:

Why did you gave the painting of the Peacemakers a painterly look? It is quite a contrast to your normal drawings. Wouldn’t it be better to do also the painting in your normal style? And the drawing is in perspective. Did you draw it in perspective or did you draw it normal an paste it into the distorted frame later?

My answer:

I used an image of the actual painting as the basis for these panels and then painted over it to do the changes needed for the story. I used a fully painted look because I needed it to look like a separate world than the other art. That was the point. If I did it in the same style is would not have worked as well.

I did the art first and then used digital magic to add the perspective.

Here’s the next page with the rest of that sequence:

I thought Ian did a great job with the spoof song lyrics ala Frank Jacobs. That’s not easy to do. Not only do you need to make the rhymes fit but the syllable and cadence of the lyrics need to match that of the original song, or it is awkward and doesn’t work well.

Here’s the last page and the pencil roughs:

That’s it for another week of MADness. We are inching closer to the end of the road. Toon in next week for a look at what for a few years there looked to be the last full MAD movie parody to appear in the magazine.