MADness #47- Two for One!

It’s Monday already?!? Time for another installment of the game show that has everyone reaching for their remote controls, our chronological crawl through my work at MAD Magazine! This episode we have a look at the work I did for MAD #463, March 2006, which features a first for me with the magazine… the first issue in which I had two separate pieces featured. That’s twice the garbage for the same outrageous price!

The first piece I did was a parody of the TV Show “Everybody Hates Chris”, written by the great Arnie Kogen. Whenever MAD does a “narrated” show like this there are always “floating heads” doing the narration balloons. I do those heads separately, usually four or five different ones, and just reuse them throughout the piece. In this case they are all caricatures of Chris Rock.

I added a couple of friends as cameos in the splash. The guy saying the “TV Guide” line is caricaturist Elgin “Subwaysurfer” Bolling, and the guy between him and Bill Cosby is my neighbor Allen Glenn.

One thing I loved about doing this job was drawing the cast of this show. They are all doing over-the-top characters with terrific expressions to caricature. That makes things fun.

Much to my surprise I was assigned another piece for this issue. It was a sort of advertising parody. Back in the early to mid 2000’s Apple had a series of ads for their fairly new iPod that featured silhouettes of people against candy colored backgrounds with a glaring white iPod and earbuds/cords that popped out via the contrast while the silhouettes danced and moved about. This two page spread was a riff on that ad campaign. It was written by Russ Cooper.

I don’t have any pencil sketches for this one for some reason. Sadly the nature of the gags required more information that just a simple silhouette could pull off, so we had to cheat and do some line art as well. It was a fun little piece though. Also, I got paid the same page rate for these two pages as I did for the pages in the TV parody… guess which took longer to do? It was like stealing money!

Toon in next week for another nail-biting episode, when we go back to school and learn absolutely nothing!