MADness #134- The Tarantino Issue!

Welcome to another moronic MAD Monday, as we creep quietly towards the end of MAD‘s run as a magazine of new content in our look back my the work for the magazine. We’ve reached MAD #9, Oct 2019, the issue where its existence as the magazine we all knew and loved for (at the time) 67 years came to an end. Yes, MAD continued (and continues) to print a new issue every two months. Yes, there was new content in the next few issues after this one. However, this was the last issue that was distributed on newsstands. Starting with the next issue, you could only get your copy of the new MAD at a local comic book shop, or via a direct subscription. For almost seven decades, MAD was found at newsstands, in grocery stores, drug stores, book stores… anywhere a magazine rack might be found. Not after this issue… a true end of an era. Little did we know at the time more changes for the worse were nigh.

This was the issue where we tied into the release of Quentin Tarantino‘s film “Once Upon a Time in… Hollywood”. This cover is the same art I did for the 1962 prop cover that appeared in the film. I told the story of how this and the accompanying TV Guide prop cover came about here and here,  and the story of how the retro-style “parody” of the film’s fictional “Bounty Law” TV show ended up being done and appearing in this issue here, so I won’t do that again. Go visit those links if you want to read the stories.

Here’s the full parody and the pencils. This was written by Andrew Secunda:

I go into the nuts and bolts of this job in that link above, but briefly the idea here was that this was supposed to be a parody done back in the 60’s but never got printed. MAD art director Suzy Hutchinson did this one better by making the entire first 1/3 or so of the issue look like an old 60’s issue, complete with table of contents, letter pages, some other features done in a retro style and an aged effect to the pages themselves.

I actually did ANOTHER parody in this issue, so toon in next week for MAD #9 Part 2!