MADness #66- More MADvertising!

It’s Monday again, and that means another riveting episode in our rampaging romp through my work at MAD magazine! This week we take look at another of MAD’s odd forages into advertising.

In 2007 and 2008 MAD did some unique advertising inserts which were put into many of DC’s comic books as well as MAD itself. These consisted of a kind of “Mini-MAD” which centered around a subject that was the product which was being promoted. These were done very tongue in cheek, and the subject matter needed to fit with the MAD format. The first one was for Ballpark Franks which appeared in MAD #480, and which I wrote about a few weeks ago.

The second and last was in MAD #486 (and other DC Comics titles that same month). This was was not promoting a product, but rather a comedy troupe called The Whitest Kids U Know. The “WKUK” had a sketch comedy television show on the FUSE Network in 2007, which had moved to the Independent Film Channel for season two and beyond until 2011. IFC is uncensored so, unlike on FUSE, their sketches aired intact and unedited. Their material can be very adult and racy, so no doubt they and their fans were glad of the change.

Like the Ballpark Franks, project, this was an inserted “Mini-MAD” that could be removed as its own small booklet. Mark Fredrickson did the cover, and Dick DeBartolo and Hermann Mejia did a “Get to Know the Whitest Kids U Know…” two page spread on the members of the troupe. Sam Viv… uh… Jack Syracuse, Tom Bunk, Drew Friedman and myself were called on to illustrate in comic format four of the troupe’s most famous sketches. I was assigned one called “Sexy Fawn”.

Here’s the rough sketch of my comic version:

To say these were weird jobs is an understatement. Here we were, working for a magazine that was famous for (among so many things) vilifying the advertising industry, and doing ads that usurped the very format we had been using for decades to badmouth advertising.

I plan on writing a long post about advertising and MAD one of these days. But not today! Fa fa fa!

I actually posted this art not that long ago, because one of the members of the WKUK troupe, Trevor Moore, died in an accident last year. By the way, Moore started out as a cartoonist and first had his work published at the age of 12.

Toon in next week when we return (finally) to the world of TV/Movie parodies with a look at a sort of comic book superhero show spoof.