MADness #44- Extreme Makeover!

It’s Monday… AGAIN?!? Seems like this happens every single week! Well, it’s once again time for another pulse-pounding episode in our chronological crawl through my work at MAD Magazine. Today we take a look at MAD’s spoof of “Extreme Makeover: Home Edition”, written by MAD’s MADdest Writer Dick Debartolo and first appearing in MAD 460, December 2005.

I remember this splash page being a very tough one to “solve”, meaning to figure out how to lay it out with the word boxes working with the characters speaking them all within a single environment. The show always begins with the designers and contractors in their big RV reviewing the “story” of the person/family whose house they are about to renovate. That character’s story has three separate scenes with three REALLY big word boxes. with another character’s word box between the home owner’s second and third box. The boxes are already 12 lines deep, which is ridiculous, and span the page from almost edge to edge, so there is no way for us to add a “stem” connector and drop the blonde lady with the tissue box’s word box down. So I am stuck with at least two word box stems for the home owner’s dialogue and a person in the way. The very horizontal nature of that first panel with so much dialogue also makes setting the scene inside an RV challenging.

My solution was to use multiple monitors and have each feature a visual of the scene in the boxes, and to have a kind of warped, distorted perspective to the inside of the RV. It kind of works because of the camcorder in the foreshortened foreground makes the forced perspective make sense.

Hey look! I have a scan of the final pencils for this splash! I have no idea why I scanned them, but here they are:

It’s rare I have any scans of the final pencils, because the approvals are done with the roughs, and there’s no need to do anything with the pencils except start inking them. I have no idea why I scanned them, but there you have it.

This parody was the height of what I call my “shiny face” period. I always overdid the highlights on people’s faces with the color, and everyone looked like the “before” kid with the oily face in those old Stridex commercials. If I remember right this was the job where, when I saw it in print, realized I needed to tone down the hot spots on skintones.

I really don’t know why MAD spoofed so many of these “HGTV” type shows. I seriously doubt your average MAD reader ever watched any of these shows, yet I did the art on parodies of this one, “Trading Spaces”, “Fixer Upper” and a multi-page multi-show features called “Home Renovations: HGTV vs. Real Life”. I suspect it was because one of the MAD editors was a fan of those types of shows.

The guys holding up the severed head in the upper left panel is a friend of mine, fellow caricaturist turned talent agent Mike Hasson. Since this issue came out Mike started running, lost something like 80 pounds and now does marathons. That;’s the power of an unflattering caricature at work!

That’s another MAD job in the can! Toon in next week for another edge-of-your-seat chapter of a look back at my work for MAD, with a job that was an absolute circus!