MADness #75: The Loan Wars!

What?!? It’s Monday AGAIN? Time for another installment of our chronological trip through the bankrupt mess that is my work for MAD Magazine! This week we have a look at another piece from “The MAD 20” aka “MAD‘s 20 Dumbest People, Events and Things: of the year. The year was 2008, and as usual there was no shortage of dumb things to make fun of. This piece appeared in MAD #497, Jan 2009.  It’s a commentary on the government bailout of the big banks after the mortgage implosion crisis. The concept was to spoof of “Star Wars: The Clone Wars” but with Ben Bernanke, Henry Paulson, Nancy Pelosi and Barney Frank (with cameos by G.W. Bush and Dick Cheney). The art would be on a DVD cover but I did it more like a movie poster, using the original “Clone Wars” poster as reference. I had to try and imitate the look of the animated characters in caricature. Here’s the full image:

I’m pretty sure I got this assignment thanks to the MAD KIDS cover I had just done, which also was aping the look of the “Star Wars: The Clone Wars” animated movie. Here’s the sketch:

Incidentally when I was working a caricature gig at the Democratic National Convention in 2009 in Charlotte, NC, I met Rep. Barney Frank. When I told him I’d drawn him in MAD he said he’d seen and loved that piece and asked me to send him a print of it, which I did.

That’s it for this week’s Monday MADness! Toon in next week as we have a look at one of the craziest crowd scene pieces I ever did for MAD, and that’s saying something.