MADness #42: Family Guy!

As if Monday’s weren’t bad enough, it’s time for another stop on the chronological crawl through my work for MAD Magazine! Today’s look back is another of those “Backstage” features, this time skewering the animated TV show “Family Guy”. “MAD‘s Exclusive Backstage Tour of the Family Guy” was written by David Richards and first appeared in MAD #458, Oct 2005.

This was a very interesting job for a “behind the scenes” reason. Writer “David Richards” is a pseudonym for another writer who had a connection to the actual show, which is why he used a pseudonym. I’m not going to “out” him here because it’s not my place to do that. Due to that connection to the show, there are a lot of caricatures of actual writers and animators from the show in this piece that most people would never know were there.

The five faces along the top of the left hand page are all actual writers from the show. I can’t remember their names but I was given references and asked to include them. Ditto the animator at the drawing board near the bottom right on the spread. I threw me in just for fun, and that is not my mom but might be someone else’s mom… can’t remember what that was all about. That’s an actual caricature of Dalton Ross, who wrote for Entertainment Weekly, and beloved MAD editor Nick Meglin at bottom right. Anyway as a result of that insider connection, I did a lot more caricatures in this piece than are immediately apparent. If I remember right, we printed out a bunch of copies of this splash at the behest of the writers and artists that appeared in it.

I don’t recall if any of the writers in this last page are actual writers from the show. I don’t think so. I’m pretty sure that we worked them all into the splash for obvious reasons.

The “cutaway” of the brick wall here was the only way I could figure out how to work the outside gag work with all the stuff needed to be shown inside. I remember considering somehow showing that gag through a window or a door, but because that was the final gag it needed to be at the bottom right of the page which made a window shot impossible. I don’t much like doing imaginary environments like this, but it was the best way to pull it off.

Seth MacFarlane owns the original of this splash page.

Toon in next week, when we look at a feature that combines a bunch of mini movie spoofs in one article!