MADness #77: The Following!

It’s Monday, and you know what that means! Yes, for most people it means you had to get up and go to work… but that’s the good news! The bad news is that it’s time for yet another sickening look back at my work for MAD Magazine. This week we have a peek at the second piece I had in MAD #525 (Feb 2014), a parody of the TV show “The Following”, written by the great Arnie Kogen. As I foreshadowed last week, with this particular assignment I tried something different I had never attempted before.

So what was this experimental technique I tried, and why did I try it? The main reason was to see if it saved me any time with the process of doing these elaborate parodies. These things are incredibly time consuming, and I was always looking to find ways to work more quickly and efficiently, as long as it did not compromise the work. Cutting corners or just “mailing it in” is not what I mean. Ways to streamline the process is what I was looking for.

Anyway I did things a little differently this time around, and I didn’t tell anyone at MAD I was doing it because I wanted to see if they noticed a difference. Once I turned in the final art, I emailed MAD art director Sam Viviano and asked him what he thought of the finishes. He said everyone was very happy with them as usual. I then told him I’d “done something a little differently” with this one and if he could figure out what. This was his response:

“I’ve been losing sleep trying to figure out what you did differently on “The Swallowing,” and the only guess I could come up with is that, maybe, you inked it digitally. To be honest, I don’t think I would have had a thought that this piece was unlike your others in any way, had you not asked me the question. Still, it will indeed be up to you, after seeing the printed article, to decide how you want to proceed in the future. If my guess (and that’s really all it is) is correct, I’ll hit you with Meglin’s constant query: “How’re you gonna sell the original art if there ain’t any?!!!”

He was right, I did the entire parody digitally, inks and all. Here’s the digitally inked image of the splash:

I did the whole thing in Photoshop, start to finish.

I decided never to do it again.

So why not? If the art director of MAD had trouble figuring out I inked this digitally, clearly there was not much difference in the look from doing traditional inks. Why not keep doing things this way? Three reasons…

Firstly, I noticed a difference- To me the inks looked blocky, too heavy, and somewhat lifeless. There’s a certain warmth and organic feel bestowed by the physical interaction between ink, pen and bristol board surface that I cannot duplicate digitally. Also, the lined felt blunted… no sharpness. All that was missing here, and I didn’t like the results.

Secondly, it didn’t save me any time- I figured not having to print out the sketches, transfer them over to bristol board, and then do some redrawing/tightening up of the faces in pencil before really starting to ink would save me time. Nope. I spent too much time having to redo lines that didn’t go the way I wanted them to go the first time to have saved any time in the long run.

Thirdly, I like having something physical I can hold in my hand to show for all the time and hard work I put into something like this. I don’t get that working 100% digitally.

I actually did do one other MAD spoof 100% digitally once, but that was by necessity because of circumstances. That story will have to wait for another Monday! Toon in next week for another thrilling episode from Tom’s MAD chronicles, where we return to the dystopian world of the Hunger Games!