MADness #49- Brokeback Mountain!

Yeehaw! It’s Monday, and that means it’s time for another stop on the dusty trail that is my work for MAD Magazine. Today we have a look at MAD‘s spoof of the multiple Oscar winning film “Brokeback Mountain”, written by Arnie Kogen and appearing in MAD #465, May 2006. I thought MAD doing a spoof of this film was a real surprise for a couple of reasons. First, because of the lag between when a movie is in theaters and when the MAD parody appears in print, and given how short a time most movies spend playing in theaters nowadays, MAD mostly stuck with big event/popcorn movies rather than serious dramas as parody subjects. Second, the subject matter of this movie is not something that is easy to spoof. This was a nice break for me from doing movies with wands, capes, robots or fangs in it.

On another note, it’s unusual that I have scans of both the rough sketches and final pencils of most of the pages. Here’s the rough sketch of the splash:

And here’s the final pencils, on bristol board ready for inking:

The final inks:

About a year ago I did a “AMA” on Reddit and during the chat I posted this splash page. Someone almost immediately commented (I’m paraphrasing) “Oh look, homophobia. Funny.”. That is of course without actually reading it. There are a lot of jokes about the sex, there are several jokes that make fun of the homophobic characters in the movie and the homophobia of others. Reading it over even now with an eye from this ultra sensitive age, none of the jokes disparage homosexuality. The gag about how the wives are hot and being “wasted” is the closest thing to denigrating homosexuality, and in retrospect that one should have been cut. It’s not overtly bad but could be taken as such.

Most of the jokes that one might take offense to have to do with sex/anal sex, but those are simply jokes about sex. If you were to switch Jake Gyllenhaal‘s character from a man to a woman, all those jokes still work because they aren’t about anyone being gay. They are about two people having sex. Even the gags about anal sex still work because (and you can check the internet if you don’t believe me) not only gay men engage in anal sex. Gags about bare butts are not about being gay. The only jokes in this parody that are about homosexuality are about how these are supposed to be tough, manly cowboys who are as far from your stereotype of a gay man as you can get, which is of course a central theme to the film, or about gay stereotypes in general, or about the homophobia of others.

I thought Arnie did a great job coming up with gags that were decidedly NOT homophobic. However this is 2021 and any humor that addresses a topic like this is going to get accused of being bigoted no matter what. My guess is MAD would never have done a spoof of this film if it had come out today, no matter how they handled it. That’s just the nature of the world today.

On the art end of things, I did a running gag of having a sheep doing something goofy somewhere in almost every panel. I particularly liked the gag of the sleeping sheep counting jumping naked cowboys.

Well, pardner… that’s another rootin’ tootin’ episode of our mosey down the trail of my work for MAD riding into the sunset. Toon in next week as we return to the world of reality TV!