MADness #30: The O.C.!

We are back on track with another exciting episode of our chronological crawl through my work for MAD Magazine! This week features MAD’s spoof of the TV show “The O.C.” written by Dennis Snee and appearing in MAD #442, June 2004. I have some of the original pencil roughs for this one as well as the finals.

This show was set in Orange County, California and was about teenagers from that area. I knew a couple of teenagers from OC, Joe and Luke McGarry, who were the teenage sons of cartoonist Steve McGarry, then president of the National Cartoonists Society. So, I drew Joe and Luke into the splash page. That’s them to the left of Mischa Barton. Both are now musicians and formed a popular LA band named Pop Noir, Luke is now a big shot illustrator and even contributed to MAD a number of times, and Joe is an ace animator, artist, and web designer… in fact he coded this very website!

Shortly after this parody came out I got an e-mail from a gentleman named Danny Bilson. Danny is a well known writer/director/executive producer who created the 90’s TV series The Sentinel, and has numerous other credits including the TV series Viper (creator), writer for the TV series The Flash and the screenplay for The Rocketeer. He did a lot of writing for video games, especially for the James Bond series. With all the comic book related endeavors, it was not surprising to hear from him that he is a big fan of MAD Magazine. Danny also happens to be the father of actress Rachel Bilson, who is of course one of the stars of The O.C. When he saw the parody in MAD he googled me and inquired about the original art for the splash. He related the Michael J. Fox quote about how he “knew he’d made it when he was drawn by Mort Drucker in MAD”, and he felt the same about Rachel being in the magazine. Of course I quickly pointed out that being drawn by me rather than Mort in MAD was more like a baseball player getting to play catch with Bob Uecker instead of Babe Ruth, but he was not deterred.

He inquired about the original art for the splash page, but I had already given that to Steve since his boys were in it. Instead, I tapped MAD to send me two oversized prints of the splash. I mailed both to Danny plus the only other page in the parody that featured Rachel’s caricature. I asked that he give one of the prints to Rachel to get some cast signatures.

A few weeks later I got it back, with signatures from Rachel and Adam Brody, her love interest on the show and at the time in real life. Apparently it was during a taping break from the show, so there were no other cast signatures. Then again maybe the other stars of the show were just pissed off at their caricatures… although I am pretty tame compared to many caricaturists. Either way I ended up with this piece that hangs proudly on the Wall of Shame:

nterestingly enough this remains the only piece I’ve ever done in MAD that I received hate mail from. It seems a few people were a little upset about my depiction of Mischa Barton. One told me I’d made her look like a “holocaust victim”, and in general most of the e-mails were angry that I made the girl who’s poster resided on the ceiling above their beds look anything less than hot. Sorry, but the skin and bones body I gave her was an example of ‘selling the gag’… her word balloon referred to her being “skinny enough to make Paris Hilton want to join Weight Watchers”. That required a visual.

Here’s some of the pencil roughs for that assignment (clicky to embiggen):

Toon in next week for another spine-tingling episode featuring yet another TV satire… this time another “reality” show!