MADness #15- Spider-Man!

We continue our Monday MADness chronological crawl through my work for MAD with a look at my 15th appearance in the magazine, and my first “Superhero” movie parody. This is a spoof of the first Tobey Maguire Spider-Man film, written by Dick DeBartolo and appearing in MAD #418, June 2002.

I remember I inked a lot of this job while I was attending a National Caricaturists Network convention in Las Vegas in 2002. That splash page features a lot of cameos of people I know. From the far left, the guy in the blue shirt is my pal Jim Batts, the little girl with the pink bow is my daughter The Dramatic Victoria. The three guys with beards are MAD art director Sam Viviano, and MAD editors Nick Meglin and John Ficarra. The guy pointing up with the tie is me, and next to me is The Lovely Anna, daughters The Animated Elizabeth and The Effervescent Gabrielle and Number One Son Tom. The guy peeking around the corner is my pal Keelan Parham, whom I barely knew at the time but was attending the convention and he harassed me into adding him in… at least that’s story I’m sticking with.

This particular splash page is special to me, because Nick Meglin always told me it was the piece I did for MAD that convinced him I was going to be a go-to artist for them going forward. He said it represented what MAD was all about, juxtaposing the silliness with a dose of convincing realism, writing in the kind of chicken fat that adds but doesn’t distract from the story, and had the sense of whimsy and fun that they were always looking for. That was heady praise coming from someone like Nick. I still have the original art from that splash.

The consistency in my caricatures was still still hit and miss, however. Some of my caricatures of Tobey Maguire were solid and some missed the mark. All of my caricatures of James Franco were lousy, IMO.

I wished I’d saved the scripts and other stuff from these early jobs… it’s impossible to remember which visual gags were mine and which were suggested by Dick. I’m pretty sure all the superhero cameos were mine. Adding Stan Lee was arbitrary. He actually had a cameo in the film, which was his first (I think) in a Marvel superhero movie, but he wasn’t a homeless person.

This was the first of many superhero movie spoofs I did for MAD. Fifteen of them, in fact. I guess being a comic book geek sometimes pays off. I’m sure my familiarity with the world of comics had a lot to do with my getting so many of the superhero movie jobs over the years. I could add insider gags like the one with Daredevil sniffing Peeper in the last panel of the page above.

So that last panel with the Steve Ditko rolling over in his grave gag… I think it was my gag. The thing was that Steve Ditko was not dead. In fact he didn’t die until 2018. I honestly have no idea what prompted me to do that gag. I knew he was still alive. I think it was some misguided idea that the treatment of Spider-Man in the movie, with the organic webbing and all, would have killed him. I dimly remember thinking it was a commentary on his basically being a recluse. Regardless that didn’t read very well. I’m very surprised the editors didn’t nix that one since it made no sense unless Ditko was actually passed.

This job ended what was a seven issue in a row run for me. That would be one of the longest consecutive issue runs for me up until I started my 71 issue run that ended last year when MAD when full reprint. I would not have anything in the next TWO issues of MAD, something that only happened one other time in my twenty years with the magazine. This was because I did something I only ever did once… I turned down an assignment from MAD!

Toon in next week and I’ll tell the story of the movie parody I didn’t do, and share my next MAD job… another sports-centric feature.