MADness #70: Honey Boo Boo Family Circus!

Grab your tiara and Go Go Juice! It’s time for another installment of the train wreck that is our look back at my work for MAD Magazine! This week enter the year 2013 with this piece from MAD #520, “Honey Boo Boo’s Family Circus”, written by Frank Santopadre.

I was initially thrilled to get this assignment for a two reasons. First, it wasn’t a movie or TV parody, and while I love doing those for MAD they are a ridiculous amount of work and it’s nice to have a change and do something different now and then. The second, and more relevant for me, was that this particular job required me to mimic the style of Bil Keane and his famous “The Family Circus” syndicated comic. Why would that be important and fun for me? Because I was (and still am) good friends with Bil’s son Jeff Keane, who assisted his father for years on the strip and took it over when Bil retired. Jeff and I are both former National Cartoonists Society presidents, and have been on many USO Tours together. I knew he’d love this. He didn’t suspect a thing when I called him up and casually worked in the question “so… what kind of brush do you use to ink the strip?” I gave him all the original art after the issue came out.

What I didn’t know was this job would teach the folks at MAD that I was capable of mimicking the style of other cartoonists… a skill that is valuable to have working for a magazine that spoofs pop culture. The bad part of having that skill is that, while the occasional job doing that is fun, it’s easy to find too many of your jobs are aping the work of others and you don’t get to be yourself. While I did end up doing a few of these types of assignments over the years I knew I did not have to worry about being ‘typecast’ as a copycat artist because MAD art director Sam Viviano was very aware of that dynamic. He is also very adept at mimicking the look of other cartoonists, and back when he was a regular freelancer with MAD he told the editors that, while he was happy to do a copycat type job, after doing one he wanted his next job to be in his own style. That was smart, and guaranteed he would not get pigeonholed into the “aping other styles” role.

This was actually kind of a tricky assignment. I had to try and capture likeness of the people from the show and yet stay within the Keane style. It ended up being pretty easy to do. The body types of the show’s family matched up pretty well with the tree trunk ankles and thick torsos of the Family Circus characters, so that helped. The “caricatures” were in a similar vein to the ones you see on “The Simpsons”, where because the look of the characters need to be consistent (in their case the overbite and no chin, etc) you need to look beyond those elements and find where you can impose features and expression to help get a likeness. Invariably there are much more cartoon characters than caricatures, but it worked surprising well in most cases.

I would do another “Family Circus” feature a few years later, this time of a political nature. But, that’s a Monday MADness for another day! Here are a few close ups of some of the panels:

That’s it for another trashy Monday MADness! Toon in next week when we return to the world of movie parodies with a multi-film spoof extravaganza!