MADness #66: Breaking Bad!

I knew I shoulda turned left at Albequerque! Welcome to another miserable MAD Monday, where we continue our decent into the drug-addled abyss that was my work for MAD Magazine. When you think about it, this whole look back at my MAD work is a little like meth… it makes you sick and you don’t want to keep doing it but now that we’ve started we just can’t stop!

This week we take a look at one of my favorite pieces I did for the magazine. One of the questions I get asked a lot is “is it easier to do a spoof of a show you hate or one that you love?” The answer to that is “Yes!” Either way the show invokes an emotional reaction for me, and that makes it interesting. This is one of the shows I absolutely loved, and after I watched the first two seasons to do the spoof I continued to watch the show through to the end. Here’s MAD‘s spoof of “Breaking Bad”, written by my CLAPTRAP partner Desmond Devlin and first appearing in MAD #516, August 2012.

When I really hate a show or movie I take glee in ripping it a new one in the parody. If I really like the subject matter I can still make fun of it, but because I enjoyed watching it I am more invested in the characters and the story so I notice details and relate to the nuances that add to gags and visuals in the art that are meaningful to the show. For example the visual gag in the splash page of having Walter White in his underwear with the gun stuck into the back of his tighty whities is both a nod to a scene fans of the show would immediately recognize and says something about the absurdity of the character… an awkward nerdy guy who becomes dangerous.

This one was also fun in that I got to draw Bryan Cranston again. He was the father in “Malcom in the Middle”, which was my first TV or movie parody for MAD. He’d gotten a lot craggier and balder since those days.

That’s it for another vein-popping episode of Tom’s Monday MADness! Toon in next week when we return to the world of superhero movies… and almost never leave it again.