MADness #67: Heroes!

“Save the Cheerleader, Save the World?”… We were barely able to save this parody! It’s time for another episode of our relentless time-travelling trip through my work at MAD Magazine! This week we have a look at another TV parody, this time skewering the show “Heroes”. Written by my CLAPTRAP cohort Desmond Devlin, this spoof first appeared in MAD #487, March 2008.

My pencil roughs were truly “roughs” for this job. I was trying to attempt to spend less time with the comps and do more of the actual drawing things out on the final boards. As a result, I was reduced to labeling the heads so the MAD staff would know who was who throughout the parody when looking at the roughs.

This parody was significant in one way… I THINK it was the first one I worked on exclusively with then assistant art director Ryan Flanders. Up until then art director Sam Viviano had always art directed the movie and TV parodies I worked on, which is no small feat. The art director does the “mechanicals” aka the layouts of the pages, composes the panel placements/sizes, does the copy and nested word boxes, designs the spoof title graphics, and then art directs me through the different stages of the job.

Ryan started with MAD as a production artist shortly after I started freelancing for them, so we were literally “the new guys” at the same time. Over the years Ryan rose through the art department ranks to eventually claim the full title of “Art Director” (Sam had some high falutin’ title like “Vice President of Art and Design” or something like that). Anyway I am pretty sure this was the first movie/TV parody Ryan art directed all himself with me.

I’m not sure why I don’t have a scan of the full pencils of the splash page, but here are the roughs and the final pencils of the story pages:

After this issue came out MAD was contacted by Michael Green, one of the producers of the show, who wanted to buy the original art. Michael is a big MAD fan, and was thrilled that his show got spoofed in the magazine. This happens every once and awhile. A lot of people, especially ones who work in the creatives fields, grew up reading MAD and credit the magazine as an influence on. When I would do the art on a movie or TV parody, I’d sometimes get a call from a producer or writer or even one of the actors asking about the originals. They were always very polite in masking their disappointment that Mort Drucker hadn’t done the art, which had they mentioned it I would wholeheartedly agree. Anyway Michael bought the art and was kind enough to get many of the cast to sign a print of the splash page for me, which hangs proudly on my “Wall of Shame” in the studio:

Toon in next week for another nail biting chapter, where I really monkey around on a job drawing the staff of MAD!