MADness #64- Mike & Molly!

It’s yet another Monday, and that means yet another big, fat look back at my work for MAD magazine. This week we go dough-nuts with a peek at MAD‘s parody of the heavy-duty sitcom “Mike & Molly”, written by Arnie Kogen and first appearing in MAD #514, April 2012.

Very few jobs I was given by MAD made me unhappy, but this one did. I have to say I was not much of a fan of this show, or this spoof. Both were filled with a lot of cheap fat jokes, most of which come off as mean as opposed to funny. I tried to pitch the “hall of fame” board at the “Overeaters Anonymous” meeting from the splash to be filled with cartoon characters who were known for their girth (see pencils above), but the editors wanted me to include real actors who were associated with being fat, which I also thought was not funny but swinging at low hanging fruit. I was also told to include MAD editor John Ficarra and art director Sam Viviano in the splash for reasons I was never made aware of. This necessitated me making them look overweight so they’d have a reason for being there. That’s them in the bottom right of page one. That part was fun.

It’s tough to do a spoof of a typical sitcom. Fortunately for Arnie this show was filled with characters that were really bad stereotypes, so he could make fun of how over the top they were. The drunken oversexed older mom, the stoner slutty sister, the immigrant working a food service job, the hypochondriac overbearing mother, etc, etc. Of course the fact that they were portrayed as “over the top” in the show was obvious to anyone who watched it, so it wasn’t very insightful to point it out in the parody. That and cheap fat jokes were about all we had to work with.

Being that that last panel took place at a Cubs game at Wrigley Field, I could not resist having Steve Bartman make a cameo appearance.

The other thing about doing this spoof that hade me very unhappy was that I was told I could no longer ink the word boxes into my art, but had to do what the staff called “full art” for this and all subsequent work I did for the magazine.

Up until then I had always drawn and inked the word boxes into my art, delivering MAD a final that had blank boxes included, which they then digitally placed the copy into. I did this because it saved me a lot of time. I did not have to draw and color all this art that would be hidden behind word boxes. In some cases half (or more) of the area of a given panel is covered in word boxes. That’s a lot of area I didn’t need to waste my time filling with visuals no one was ever going to see.

I was told I was now required to do “full art” because MAD was coming out with a proprietary app for its digital version of the magazine, and because of how the pages loaded for the reader the art would appear first followed by the copy. They wanted that brief moment where the page had no copy (said copy was to include the balloons and “tails”) to be all art, and then the words would magically appear. So a page of my final art had to look like this, with no word boxes and all the backgrounds complete:

This was very frustrating, because these jobs already took a long time to do, and this was adding not an insignificant amount of time to them. The obvious solution is to eliminate a lot of the backgrounds completely and do something simple, like I did in the bedroom scene in panel two in the page above. That is not always possible, and in fact is detrimental to the parody because the environments and sets are often a big part of the show, especially when doing movie spoofs, and it’s important to capture those in the art. Look at that last panel in the page above. The scene is set in the stands at a baseball game. I had to draw and color the complete crowd behind the main characters, despite a lot of the faces being covered by the word boxes.

Fortunately this mandate only lasted a few issues, but it was a paint in the ass while I had to do it.

That’s it for another episode! Toon in next week when we return to the world of super hero movie spoofs!!