MADness #63: The Sheen Lantern!

By Oa, It takes a lot of willpower to keep doing these lame looks back at my work for MAD Magazine, but Mondays are already the worst day of the week so let’s just roll with it. This week we have a peek at another “MAD’s 20 Dumbest People, Events and Things of…” the year, this time 2011. That was the year Charlie Sheen went crazy, getting booted off his hit TV show “Two and a Half Men” and raving about tiger blood, wizards, and “winning” while looking more and more like a crackhead. MAD took notice and he made the MAD 20 with this piece written by Kit Lively and Scott Nickel, and appearing in MAD #513, February 2012.

As I mentioned last week, I redeemed myself a bit in the digital painting department with this piece. The job called for two distinct art styles: a painted cover type image for the spread, and the more standard comic book line-and-color look for the three comic book covers. The art direction I got was to do an “Alex Ross-ish” look to the spread, and then a typical sort of look for the comic covers. I’m no Alex Ross, but I did a much better job with the digital painting this time around. I THINK replacing the lantern with a glowing Jack Daniels bottle was my gag, but I don’t remember for sure. The toughest thing about this piece was getting a likeness of Martin Sheen despite the giant Guardian’s blue forehead.

This was the only piece written by Kit and/or Scott I did for MAD. Kit wrote a number of very funny peices for MAD, especially for “The Strip Club” feature, and Scott usually drew them. Scott also did some solo “writer/artist” pieces for the magazine. It was fun to get to work on something of theirs.

Here are some close ups of the comic book covers:

That’s it for another intergalactic look back at my work for MAD! Toon in next week when we look at a really big, heavy TV sitcom spoof.