MADness #69: Samantha Who?

It’s Monday AGAIN!?! It seems like this happens every week. In today’s installment of our incredibly tedious hike through the twisted trails that was my work for MAD Magazine, we have a look at a spoof of a TV show about a woman who forgets everything about herself… which is appropriate because no one remembers anything about this show! Actually it got high ratings its first season but was cancelled during its second season, but it wasn’t exactly ‘Friends”. “Slomantha, Who Cares?” was written by MAD‘s MADdest Writer Dick DeBartolo and was first published in MAD #489, May 2008.

This is another job where I tried to simplify the rough sketches and then do my more complete pencils on the full boards themselves. Above are the roughs, and here are the final pencils before inking:

And I even have a scan of the uncolored inks for this one!:

I remember this job because my first job in comics was pencilling a title called “Married… with Children” for a company called NOW Comics back in the early 1990’s so I drew (sort of) caricatures of Christina Applegate a lot for that title. It was interesting to revisit her face more than a dozen years since I drew my last my last “Married… with Children” comic.

I even got to draw the Bundy’s again, thanks to the flashback panel on the bottom right of page 3. The scary part was I didn’t have to dig up any reference for Al, Peg, or the Bundy living room. I can still draw all that out of my head to this day!

Here’s an example of a Kelly Bundy caricature of mine circa 1994:

Here’s the pencil roughs from this assignment:

Not a lot to say about this one. People often ask me which is better, to do a spoof of a show I hate or one I really like. I always say the answer to that is “yes”, because love or hate it, I have a reaction to the show that I can tap for enthusiasm to do the work. It’s shows like this one, that I don’t like nor actively dislike but am just generally “meh” with, that makes it hard to come up with gags and fun stuff.

Amnesia? Yes, please! Hopefully we’ll all soon forget we saw this parody! Toon in next week when we try to make fun of “corporate colleges”.