MADness 25: Without Sports!

It’s another riveting episode of Tom’s Chronological MAD Career! This week’s installment is a look at another sports feature entitled “Without Sports…”, written by the late Barry Liebmann, and appearing in MAD #434, Oct 2003. This was one of only two pieces I worked on with Barry, the other in 2012. Barry sadly passed away in 2017 at the way too early age of 63.

This piece is memorable for me for two reasons. First, I had a lot of fun including MAD patriarch Bill Gaines as “God” in the upper right corner.

I am pretty sure doing that was my idea, but I don’t 100% remember so I won’t claim credit for that cameo gag. Regardless drawing Bill was a blast, and an honor to do it in MAD. This caricature makes the rounds on the internet on Bill’s birthday and the anniversary of his death… I sometimes even get credit for it!

I am constantly reminded of this piece for one other reason. One of the most frustrating things about doing digital color is no matter how well you calibrate your RGB monitor, the color you see on the screen will never match the color seen in print. My solution to this with respect to painting fleshtones was to use a portion of a piece of art I did where I liked how the fleshtone color turned out in print as a palette for the base colors of newer pieces. I liked how the fleshtones in this piece printed, so I use this section of my “Without Sports” piece as a palette when I start laying in skintones:

I use the color picker in Photoshop to select the various fleshtone colors/values in this little crop image, and use them as base colors in many faces I am coloring in new pieces. I have a different one I use in the same manner for black skintones. So, I am often staring at Bobby Knight here from this piece.

Toon in next week for another exciting episode, featuring a reality TV show parody, stinky feet, a neighborhood photoshoot, and celebrities without a sense of humor!