MADness #60 1/2- MAD About Hunger!

Hot Dog! It’s time for another lukewarm serving of the overly processed meat byproduct that was my work for MAD Magazine! This week we look at a very odd side project… a six page advertising insert for “Ball Park Franks” that appeared in MAD #480, Aug 2007 and a lot of other DC comic books that same month.

Ball Park Franks started a bizarre ad campaign in the summer of 2007 called “My Hunger”. This campaign was to feature TV and magazine ads with people who, upon seeing a Ball Park Frank hotdog, sprout a hairy and muscular arm from their stomachs which in turn seizes said hotdog for its own consumption. Yes, you read that right.

Anyway we did this sort of mini MAD insert called “MAD about Hunger”. I did the cover as seen above, gag written by John Caldwell. Here was the pencil:

There were MAD features inside that riffed on the “arm and hot dog” ad campaign, including a two page Sergio Aragonés “A MAD Look at Hunger”, and a Sam Viviano/Hermann Mejia two page collaboration called “The Museum of Hunger”. I did this two pager:

If you find this bizarre you are not alone. At the time it came out a lot of MAD purists were up in arms about it. MAD had been accepting ads for about 6 years by then and many thought that was a betrayal of what MAD had always stood for, which was to mock and ridicule advertising and corporate America. This was another step down the road to MAD becoming the very thing it had always made fun of. After all, it’s one thing to have ads running amid the content of the magazine, it’s another to be actively participating in the peddling of a product like this.

The sad truth is that MAD‘s DC overlords were still trying to figure out how to make MAD reasonably profitable, since the sale of the magazine itself hadn’t been doing the job for a long time. Pimping out the brand and format like this was one of the things they were willing to do. It sucked but as long as it didn’t interfere with the content of the magazine, and MAD was still allowed to be MAD and be published, I thought it was tolerable. A necessary evil.

Just when you thought it couldnt get worse, I ended up having to do a second version of the cover that included four “VIPs” in the crowd:

I think they were executives from Ball Park Frank’s parent company The Sara Lee Corporation, but I don’t recall the specifics. I don’t even know how this second cover was used… it wasn’t the cover of any of the inserts I saw. I think it might have been just a vanity thing given to them as a gift. I did a few of those sorts of things over the years.

If all that doesn’t make you want to run out, buy, and eat several Ball Park Frank hot dogs, I am not surprised.

Toon in next week when we figure out the best way to avoid the paparazzi… by going to jail!