MADness #52: Superman Returns!

It’s a bird! It’s a plane! It’s the Superman sequel the WB wants to forget ever happened! Too late! MAD did a spoof of “Superman Returns” in MAD #468, August 2006, written by MAD‘s MADdest Writer Dick DeBartolo, so it’s immortalized… just like “Bunny Lake is Missing”!

I thought it was odd having Spider-Man narrate the first part of the parody, but it actually worked really well because the gag about his being a hipper and more relevant movie superhero aside, it allowed for an “outside looking in” explanation of the convoluted plot and how the movie attempted to be a direct sequel to 1980’s “Superman ll”.

The “censored” sign across Superman’s groin was a nod to a rumor that was going around that star Brandon Routh‘s “package” was too noticeable in the form fitting trunks and director Bryan Singer used CGI to tone it down. This was pretty much debunked but it was persistent so I did that visual gag.

I remember one thing I struggled with doing the art for this piece was having to draw Marlon Brando and Susannah York as Jor-El and Lara. It’s not that they were hard to draw, but the MAD spoofs of “Superman” and “Superman ll” were published right at the height of my MAD fan days, and Mort Drucker‘s caricatures of them and the rest of the cast are indelibly burned into my head. It’s hard for me to draw Brando at that age and not have it look like Mort’s rendition.

So at this point in my time with MAD, I was pretty much the comic book superhero movie guy. By the end of MAD’s movie parody era, I would have done the art on fifteen comic book superhero based movies (and one TV show… “Heroes”), and that doesn’t count superhero-ish action films like the Hunger Games series, T3, James Bond, etc. by the mid 2000’s MAD stopped doing parodies of dramas and mostly stuck to the big blockbuster popcorn flicks. I used to joke that if a movie didn’t have a cape, wand, robot, or hobbit in it we weren’t going to do a spoof. There were a few exceptions, but very few.

I stole a gag from Harvey Kurtzman and Wally Wood‘s classic “Superduperman!” parody from back in MAD #4 for this one, where the emblem on Stuporman’s costume changes in every panel. I didn’t get to use the gag much, however, because like the movie there weren’t very many action sequences with Superman in costume in the parody!

I can’t remember if I drew Monroe (the guy who looks like he has antennae tossing the action figure into the crater) in that middle panel on my own or if the MAD guys asked me to. I’m leaning towards the former, since I donl;t remember them ever asking me to draw Monroe into anything. For those not familiar, “Monroe” was a multi-page feature written by Anthony Barbieri and drawn by Bill Wray that ran in basically every issue of MAD from 1997 to 2006, then after a hiatus started up again with Tom Fowler doing the art. It stopped for good in 2010. Monroe was a polarizing feature… people either really hated it or really loved it. I thought it was great and I especially loved Bill’s art. It had a throwback classic feel to it. Anyway I drew Monroe in as a cameo now and again… but he doesn’t work too well for that because his weird “hair” doesn’t translate well outside of Bill’s style.

The last panel showing the kid lifting the bed is of course a nod to the cover of Action Comics #1, the first appearance of Superman.

That went by faster than a speeding bullet! Toon in next Monday when we return to the world of television with a spoof of a cooking show that is sure to leave a bad taste in your mouth!