MADness #72: Iron Man!

It’s MAD Marvel Monday! Time for another look at my work for MAD magazine, this time we check out the parody of the first of the “Marvel Cinematic Universe” films… “Ironic, Man”, written by my CLAPTRAP chohort Desmond Devlin and first appearing in MAD #492, August 2008! Ecch-selsior!

I remember that this one got done in record time… mainly because of the timing of the movie and the issue of MAD they wanted to include it in. Unusually, I got the call that this parody was coming just before the movie came out.

Desmond did the script over the opening weekend and I was drawing it by the middle of the following week… that is insanely fast for MAD, which usually had a much longer process of assessing the movie’s “parody-worthiness”, assigning the script, editing the script, laying out the results and then assigning the art and sending it all out to the artist. Des, the editors and the art department all went crazy and did it in just a few days. I had about 3 weeks to do the art, which at 5 pages wasn’t too bad of a deadline.

Unfortunately Memorial Day weekend was at the end of that time and the NCS Reuben Awards as well, plus a few other jobs and the opening of my theme park operation in Minnesota… so it was a bit of a challenge.

Deadline conquered, artwork turned in on time. Later that June, however, I heard through the grapevine that the parody might not make issue #492 after all. I called up the MAD offices thinking that it was somehow my fault and the parody was either getting pushed back or not run. MAD art director Sam Viviano reassured me it had nothing to do with me or the final results. They were simply thinking about using it in a different manner.

It turned out that MAD was putting together a special “Comic Con” issue that will be given away at San Diego Comic Con that next month in the convention goodie bags and NOWHERE ELSE… totally exclusive to Comic Con attendees. They considered putting “Ironic, Man” in that special issue briefly, but decided against it. So, it was in issue #492 as planned.

This, of course was the first of what would be 34 (as of this writing) Marvel movies in the “MCU”. However, MAD did very few parodies of MCU movies. I did this one, and the first two “Avengers” movies. There was a “sort of” parody of “Avengers: Endgame” in MAD #7, June 2019, but that wasn’t really a movie parody. It was a gag feature that was done in advance of the film that was predicting what the film’s plot would be. Interesting that MAD did so few Marvel film parodies, yet we did almost every DC film there was. Hmmmm.

That’s it for another episode of our trip through my work at MAD! Toon in next week for another superhero movie parody… this time a DC property!