MADness #69- The Dark Knight Rises!

On no! Monday again?!? It’s that same Bat-time to check on the same Bat-channel that is our look back at my work for MAD Magazine! This week we take a peek at what might be my favorite job I ever did for the magazine, MAD‘s parody of “The Dark Knight Rises”, written by Arnie Kogen and first appearing in MAD #519, February 2013.

Why is this my favorite piece for MAD? Several reasons. For one, I’m a huge Batman fan and this was the last of the Christopher Nolan trilogy films, for which I got to do the art for all three. Also this might be the best splash page I ever did. Compositionally, color, chicken fat, caricatures… they all came together nicely for this one. Also, in a rare break from tradition, I actually scanned the final pencils on the full art sized bristol boards and have that to share as well as the pencil roughs seen above:

Inks too!:

Another big reason I liked doing this one so much was that art director Sam Viviano asked me to do something I’d been wanting to try for a while, namely breaking away from the traditional MAD white panel borders and gutters and try adding color or some other effects. What I had always wanted to do was to extend one panel into the background of the page and have the other panels floating on top of it. This would necessitate some planning, since the value of the color/image in the background would have to be sufficiently contrasted from the inset panels so they did not get lost or indistinct. On page 3 I used the sky from the opening plane hijack scene as the background, which meant the other panels had to be darker values, at least on the edges:

And the opposite on page 4, where I used the darkness of the underground cavern as the background:

Here’s the roughs for those two pages:

If you are one of our CLAPTRAP book backers, you will see a LOT of this sort of thing with the art in the book. Very few of the parodies stick to the traditional white borders/gutters.

On page 5, I felt I needed to add white borders to help separate out the inset panels. There was not enough contrast between the background and the bottom three panels because of the busy nature of the stadium crowd, although I was able to use the smoke from the explosion on the field to separate out panel 4:

Panel 6 had a similar problem. It’s problematic to add a lot of detail in between panels, as that creates too much visual noise for the eye to separate out the panels from the background. You need to use value contrast for that. In retrospect I should have added more shadow to the right side of the background here to punch up the edges of the last three panels:

Page 7 just needed the white border around panel 3 to work:

Another reason why I loved doing this one is MAD abandoned the requirement that I do “full art” and could return to inking in all the word boxes like I had been doing for over a decade, saving me the time and trouble of drawing, inking, and coloring all the background areas that were going to be covered by word boxes anyway. Holy waste of time, Batman.

Here’s the story insitu:

That’s it for another edition of Tom’s Monday MADness! Toon in next week for a departure from TV and movie parodies to the world of comic strips!