MADness #54: Mel Gibson and Religious Video Games!

It’s Monday! You know what that means… time for another revolting episode of our long and winding stroll down the road that is my work for MAD magazine. MAD #471, Nov 2006 marked the second time I had multiple pieces in the same issue, and the first time I contributed anything to “The Fundalini Pages”.

Back in 2004 MAD added a feature in the front of the magazine called “The Fundalini Pages”. It appeared immediately after the “Letters and Tomatoes” section and consisted of usually four to six pages of short form features like comic strips, single panel gag cartoons, all text pieces, photo gags, etc. I was assigned the art on the above comic strip for a special subsection of that issue’s Fundalini Pages called “The MEL-dalini Pages”. This was right after actor/director Mel Gibson had his drunken run in with a cop after being pulled over and arrested on suspicion of drunk driving and went on a racist, anti semitic rant. The MEL-dalini Pages were two pages of gags about that incident.

I’d love to tell you who wrote it, but for many years the artists and writers did not get individual bylines on each piece in the Fundalini pages, but were rather listed in one place as the “Friends of Fundalini” (or in this case the “Mensches of Meldalini”), leaving MAD readers to guess who drew and wrote what, and MAD historians like Doug Gilford to be exasperated trying to identify just that! This piece was written by either Jeff Kruse, Jacob Lambert or Scott Maiko. Take your pick.

The other piece I had in issue #471 definitely WAS written by Jacob Lambert. That was a two pager entitled “When Video Games become Religious”. It is actually one of my least favorite things I ever did for the magazine. Not because of the subject matter or the writing, but because I tried to do the images that were supposed to be video game images entirely digitally, and I was not very adept at full digital painting at the time. I don’t think I captured the look of video games graphics of that era, and that art looks flat, awkward, and not very effective. I’d do a better job of this sort of thing later with several other jobs that required me to do the same thing, but this one was, IMO, a swing and a miss.

Ah well, you can’t win ’em all.

Toon in next week when we return to the world of TV satires with a spoof of a drama series set in a hospital. I know, that narrows the possibilities down to about 300 or so… television is so original.