MADness #32- Van Helsing!

I know you have all been waiting with breathless abandon for us to resume our look back through my work for MAD Magazine! This week’s episode features the very FIRST parody where I used a Wacom Cintiq for the digital coloring. It was a spoof of the movie “Van Helsing” written by Dick DeBartolo and first appearing in MAD #445, Sept 2004. I have the pencil roughs for this one!

I remember this assignment, particularly the splash page, because it was set up differently than a typical splash. There was a column of panels on the right that delved into the actual parody, leaving only the left 2/3rds of the spread for the intro image. That was not so unusual, other parodies were laid out like that. The difficult part was that the intro image was also broken into separate ‘scenes’, so I could not do a single main image. How to break that scene up and still keep it a single, opening image for the parody? I came up with the idea of separating the scenes vertically with bolts of lightning, leaving the header and intro text to be backed by storm clouds, and use the text boxes to separate the top and bottom rows for the center “column.

Up until this assignment, I had been doing my coloring using a Wacom Intuos tablet and stylus. That’s one of the tablets that does NOT have a screen built in, so you are looking up at a computer screen while your hands are working the stylus over the tablet surface below. You are not looking at your hands during this process. The “Cintiq” was brand new tech around this time, a combination monitor and tablet, where you worked directly on the screen like you would on paper, looking at your hands as you would when drawing or painting.

I really loved working on the Cintiq. While I was able to get the kind of results I wanted using the Intuos, it was not a very natural feeling process. Being able to look at my hands and see that I was doing appear at the end of my “brush” was a revelation. I’ve been using Cintiqs from wacom ever since.

Unfortunately I learned a lesson about screen resolution the hard way on this job. I really got into the painting on the splash, and I spent about an hour doodling around on the below face and surrounding area. I originally had two light sources, more dramatic shading from the lightning, etc… this is the final more simplified version:

Then I printed it out to check the color, only to realize this has how small an area that was:

I spent an HOUR painting an area the size of a dime! It was then I realized the ability to zoom into infinity on a Cintiq meant I had to be careful how close I zoomed in because I would end up wasting a lot of time painting details that would be lost in the printed final, and worse might actually look muddy and bad in print. Since then I never zoom in to more than 50% when painting a piece meant for print.

Here’s the rest of the roughs:

This may be the worst film I ever had to do a parody of, and that includes “Green Lantern”.

Toon in next week for another enthralling installment of our chronological travel through my MAD work, with yet another superhero movie parody featuring webslingers, mechanical optopus arms and a really old lady who is oddly the aunt of a teenager.