MADness #35: Law and Order C.I.!

Hold on to your warrants, boys and girls! It’s time for yet another episode of a look back at my twenty years of art for MAD Magazine… DUN DUN! This week we take a look back at MAD‘s spoof of one of the roughly two dozen “Law and Order” spin-offs, “Law and Order” Criminal Intent”, written by MAD‘s Maddest writer Dick Debartolo and first appearing in MAD #449, January 2005. Sadly the pencil roughs for this one are lost, but I do have scans of the inks! Clicky any to embiggen.

This was and remains one of my favorite TV parodies I ever did for MAD, mostly because of how much fun it was to draw Vincent D’Onofrio‘s character. He was always doing these weird and uncomfortable things when talking with witnesses or suspects where he would lean in and around their personal space, peeking around them with his head cocked oddly. That was fun to pick on, and the physical limitations of the layouts created the perfect storm for me to do it.

This was a very dialogue heavy spoof. The majority of the panels have almost half the panel space covered by word boxes up top, making the space I had for art overwhelming horizontal. That was a real problem considering the different in height between the towering D’Onofrio and the diminutive Kathryn Erbe, who played his partner. That different in size was ripe for a lot of fun visuals, but I didn’t have much vertical room to do it.

Fortunately the odd body language and movements of D’Onofrio’s “Det. Goren” gave me both a way around the horizontal limitations of the layouts and a way to really play up Goren’s awkward physicality. I drew a lot of panels like this one:

Anyone familiar with the show will instantly get the visual gag with Goren leaning around the person being questioned, and doing that enabled me to utilize the horizontal space and keep the size difference between D’Onofrio and Erbe in play.

Incidentally the name “Keith Tubbs” was a nod to a fan of the magazine who was a big online supporter (or something like that) at the time. Dick wrote him into the spoof just for fun, If I remember rightly.

The whole thing about D’Onofrio’s body language is a good example of the difference between just drawing a straight comic book style story for a parody and really contributing to that parody visually. Dick’s script (as usual) didn’t need that to carry the spoof, but it adds another layer of spoofery and makes the parody that much more on target. There’s not always a “hook” like that to take and run with, but I am always looking for something like it. Running gags that play on some aspect of the show are particularly fun and effective.

Toon in next Monday for yet another yawn-inducing peek at my MAD work, with a look at another TV parody featuring a future tiger blood infused warlock, a guy I used to get accused of looking like, and creator who is a mega MAD fan!