MADness #65- The Hunger Games!

If Monday’s seem like a bleak and barren wasteland of tedium seeming to stretch ahead forever, then this post fits right in! It’s time for another dystopian dive into the dreary dregs of drawing that was my work for MAD Magazine… and the odds are forever NOT in your favor! Yes, you are the tribute sentenced to having to look back at my artwork for MAD‘s spoof of the film “The Hunger Games”, written by my CLAPTRAP cohort Desmond Devlin and first appearing in MAD #515, June 2012.

I don’t have a lot to say about this job other than I sort of liked the film but mostly disliked the book it was based on, which I read thinking it might give me some insight into the characters and some ideas for gags. Other than shaking my head at how ridiculous the character’s names were (Katniss? Peeta? Haymitch?…) the whole story was a thinly disguised bad teenage romance. I ended up doing the art for all the “Hunger Games” films and read all the books, and the greater story of the revolution redeemed the series somewhat. The one thing I did find fascinating about the story, and what seems to be more and more prescient as time goes by, is the surreal world of marketing and “brand promotion” depicted. It seemed like a parody at the time, but it’s becoming less so.

I also disliked the need for me to continue to do “full art” for these parodies as opposed to being able to ink in word boxes with the art, which was required due to MAD’s then new digital reading app. I got creative with the splash to that effect in order to save time, using a repeating image via banners in the background knowing most of it would be covered by the word boxes and graphics, but still needing some visuals there:

I was still doing the roughs in pencil on layouts printed on drawing paper, but I would take the scans and often move stuff around, resize, etc. You can see a lot of that in the splash page pencil roughs above. By the way, the announcer in the lower right corner of the page above is my pal and fellow cartoonist John Hambrock of “The Brilliant Mind of Edison Lee” fame. I just drew him in for fun.

I forget if this was a tight deadline or if I was just behind or what, but I very seldom resorted to this sort of minimal roughs turned into MAD:

These past two pages are as rough as it gets. I had to label the scribbles so the editors would know who was where! To be fair, I probably didn’t ever need to send in much more than this at that point in my relationship with MAD… they new what to expect from me in the end.

That’s it for another Monday MADness! Toon in next week for a look at one of my favorite TV spoof jobs I ever did for MAD!