MADness #72- Superman Cover!

Look! Up in the sky! It’s a bird! It’s a plane! It’s… MONDAY! That means it’s time for another super-disappointing look back at my work for MAD Magazine!

It’s kinda funny (funny haha not funny strange) that I interrupted posting about this MAD job last week to share a new cover I had just done for the magazine, considering I intended to write about how I was always angling to do a cover and kept taking baby steps towards that goal with the MAD staff. This was one of those baby steps.

Throughout its existence MAD has produced quite a lot of different special issues, mainly filled with reprinted material. Specials, Super Specials, XLs, Classics, Color Classics, Annuals, Bookazines, etc. etc. These all (or mostly all) get new covers to entice readers into buying the same old recycled material over and over… sort of like the actual magazine today!

This was a cover for one of those special issues–”MAD Super Spectacular: Superman Man of Steel”, dated “Summer 2013”. This was an obvious attempt to capitalize on the “Man of Steel” film which was released shortly after this came out. I did this art at the very end of March 2013, and what sucks is at the time there was very little in the way of references of Superman’s new look/outfit. You could see there was a texture to it but not what it was, and that it had gauntlets and some weird piping along the sides, but there was yet to be a clear, high res shot of the suit. I had to use some candid and blurry pictures taken on the sly by someone on the movie set for all the details. I was frustrated to see that right after I finished the art a flood of images hit the internet and magazine racks, including some great shots of Henry Cavill in the suit, followed by real trailers. Oh well. A couple of months later I did the art on the MAD spoof of “Man of Steel”, and I had plenty of references for that.

You’d think that as MAD is owned by DC who is owned by Time/Warner who owns Warner Bros. who made the damn movie, we’d be able to get some good images to work from. You’d be wrong. Just like when we did parodies of the Harry Potter movies, the WB movie studio people wouldn’t give us anything to work with. Corporate America… blecch.

Here are some of the roughs and production art:

Originally MAD wanted a Kansas farmland background and I suggested a Metropolis skyline instead. I am such an idiot. It took me ten times longer to paint that skyline than it did the Superman and Alfred figures.

MAD wanted me to make some adjustments to this- they didn’t like Superman’s awkward looking left hand (they were right on that, it worked better in the sketch) and they wanted some changes to the background especially to create ‘atmospheric perspective’ by way of fading the contrast and colors and adding a haze to it.

New hand, some changes to skyline… pretty easy fixes. Fun job, but that cityscape just about killed me.

I’ll be honest, I did not like how this one turned out. I attempted to create a texture pattern to the suit and it ended up being too uniformly the same direction. It needed a lot of tweaking to change the linear pattern to wrap around the contours of the body a lot more, and I ran out of time to do that. After the better reference came out I saw the texture is actually a kind of tribal symbol pattern, which would have needed to be hand painted in. This has a flat, artificial look. Ah well, you can’t win them all.

That’s it for another super-lame edition of Monday MADness. Toon in next week for my first foray into Middle Earth with the art for MAD‘s hairy-footed spoof of “The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey”!