MADness #61: Paris Hilton!

It’s Monday, and that means another trip to solitary confinement as we continue serving time on our sentence of having to look back at my twenty years of criminally contemptible work for MAD Magazine. This week we look at a one page feature called “Things Shouted out to Paris Hilton as She Left Prison”, which first appeared in MAD #481, Sept 2007.

Everyone remembers when super-talented international superstar Paris Hilton was incarcerated in 2007 on trumped up charges by a corrupt and jealous L.A. Police Department, right?

No? That’s okay, no one else does either. Nor cares.

Actually Paris was arrested for a DUI and had her license suspended, then she must have “forgot” about that suspended license thing because he got stopped not once but TWICE driving after that, the last time doing 70 MPH in a 35 MPH zone without headlights on at night. She did end up serving about 21 days, less than half the original 45 day sentence. Her release is what this feature is all about.

No writing credit means it was written “in house” by the editors/staff. My guess is they sat around in John Ficarra‘s office and threw out lines until they had enough for the piece. Here’s the layout I got:

I was also given this list of possible people to include in the crowd:

Nicholas Kristof
Harvey Levin of TMZ.com
Perez Hilton
Anderson Cooper
Greta Van Susteren
Ron Burgandy
Osama bin Laden
Geraldo Rivera
Larry King
Nicole Richie
Barbara Walters
Paris’s Dog, Tinkerbelle
Alfred E. Neuman
Jake Byrd (actually Anthony Barbieri of the Jimmy Kimmel Show)
Kent Brockman
Tom Tucker

Of that list only Nicolas Kristof was required to be included, as there was a gag that needed his appearance to work.

Of course the problem was that a large amount of the page was to be covered by word balloons, so I didn’t have a lot of space to work with. The guys at MAD also wanted “full art”, meaning I was not to ink the word balloons but to do the art like there were no word balloons. That meant they were probably still thinking about alternate gags, and they wanted the flexibility of moving things around at will.

Here’s my basic layout:

Hostely, I really hate doing “full art” because it’s a huge waste of time. I always ink the word boxes in my parodies because I think it’s pointless to spend time doing finished art no one will ever seen because it’s being covered up by word balloons. However in a case like this it makes sense to do it that way. I just needed to try and keep recognizable people in areas where the balloons would be less likely to cover them. Here’s what my final art looked like:

Not much to this job. I think it was my gag to use police crime scene tape instead of red carpet stanchions and velvet ropes to hold back the crowd. Paris is roughly double the size of the people in the crowd, but that was the only way to get this to work, and after most of the crowd was covered by the balloons it would be hard to see the size difference anyway. I vaguely recall I wanted to draw her in an orange prison jumpsuit and have it “fashioned up” somehow like with the midriff tied off or something like that… but that idea was nixed for some reason.

Toon in next week for another thrilling tale of MADness, this time entering the world of collectible gaming cards!