MADness #67: The Avengers!

Here we go with another super-lame look back at my work for MAD Magazine. This week we go back to the endless well that is super-hero movies and revisit MAD‘s spoof of “The Avengers”, written by MAD‘s MADdest writer Dick Debartolo and first appearing in MAD #517, October 2012.

If you are looking at these pencil roughs and thinking “these are a lot looser and sketchier than Tom’s usual pencils” you are not crazy. I was making a conscious effort at the time to keep the roughs to a minimum of detail and spend more time drawing things out on the boards, rather than wasting time doing that work on the roughs and then just having to redraw it on the boards anyway. I didn’t need to have detailed roughs to show MAD after 12 years of working with them. However if you compare them to the final art, you’ll see I ended up revising a number of panels from what you see in the roughs.

One of the best things about working for MAD was getting the chance to work with a lot of different writers. Desmond Devlin was the one I collaborated with the most by far, having done 47 different features together. Dick DeBartolo was next with my doing the art for 21 of his pieces… including this one. Each writer had a very different style. Des’s writing was very visual, with jokes that needed the art to work along with the dialogue and often suggesting chicken fat gags. Dick’s writing was more dialogue-gag orientated, the jokes being contained within the word boxes not needing the art to do anything to sell the gag. Of course selling the gag is a big part of my job anyway, so I always tried to come up with something that matched the jokes in the boxes. The last panel on page four above is a good example. Dick’s joke about the flying aircraft carrier didn’t need any specific visuals to help the gag, but the art needed to show the carrier in flight as a reference point. I added the “Chitty Chitty Bang Bang” gags and the MAD zeppelin cameo.

I don’t have a copy of the script for this one, but I am pretty sure Dick wrote in all these cameos of stars from Joss Whedon‘s other shows like “Firefly”, “Buffy the Vampire Slayer” and “Dr. Horrible”. You can see in the roughs I just label who is going to be who. The caricatures got worked out on the boards in pencil and then I went right to inks.

This last page was a favorite of mine for a long time. Fun visuals especially the “Illuminati” council where I replaced most of the members with other people, the “inside the helmet” panel and getting to draw the hulk a couple of times. I would have liked to have gotten to do something for Marvel’s “What The?!?” comic back in the day.

That’s it for another miserable Monday MADness. Toon in next week for a little something different… a political feature!