MADness #76: Obama Inauguration!

Fail to the Chief! It’s Monday, and that means it’s time for another look at another im-peach of a job I did for MAD! This week we look back at “MAD Exposes Who’s Thinking What at the Obama Inauguration”, which first appeared in MAD #498, February 2009. written by not one, not two, not three, not even four MAD writers, but FIVE! Desmond Devlin, Jeff Kruse, Jacob Lambert, Frank Santopadre and Dennis Snee. That’s right, it took five writers to write the 25 gags in this three page feature. That’s five gags each! I wonder if they got paid by the gag? I sure wish I got paid by the face on this one…

This piece has a few points of significance to it for me. First, It’s one of the craziest (but not THE craziest) crowd scene I ever got assigned by MAD. Not everyone in the crowd is a caricature of a specific person, but there are 50 specific caricatures plus two “people I know” cameos as well as Alfred and Spider-Man across the three pages. Sadly a lot of these caricatures are pretty weak IMO. It’s easy to look back and see the glaring flaws in your work after the benefit of almost 14 years of growth, but still…

Second this was the first piece I ever donated to a comic art museum. Shortly after this piece got printed The Toonseum, which at the time was part of the Children’s Museum of Pittsburgh, did a show of my MAD work. I had the originals of this in the show and donated it to the museum afterward. The Toonseum closed its downtown location in 2018, but the collection must be somewhere and so are these originals.

Finally I use this two page spread as an example of how to lay out and do a crowd scene. I did a tutorial about that back in 2009, you can check it out here if interested.

That’s it for another Monday MADness! By the way, I forgot to mention when I posted the piece I did for issue #496 (Dec 2008) a few weeks ago that it was a major point in my MAD career. Beginning with that piece in that issue, I did not miss having a piece of art in another issue of MAD until #16 (vol 2, Dec. 2020), a run of 12 years and 71 issues! Of course, part of that had to do with changes at MAD as of #500, but more on that in about two weeks.

In the meantime, toon in next week when I explain how I managed to draw a naked blue man multiple times in a MAD movie parody and yet never showed his big, blue junk!