MADness #78: The Hunger Games 2!

Here we go with another ridiculous look back at my work for MAD magazine! We are entering 2014 in our little chronological trip, and this week we take a gray and dreary trudge through the dystopian world of “The Hunger Games” with MAD‘s spoof of the second film “The Hunger Games: Catching Fire”, written by my CLAPTRAP collaborator Desmond Devlin and first appearing in MAD #526, April 2014.

I had some fun on this splash page. The scene called for the crowd to do the “three fingered salute” from the film that was a sign solidarity against the “Capitol” and support for the rebellious protagonist Katniss Everdeen. My first instinct was to have everyone flipping the bird, but I know that would never fly (see here for why), so instead I tried to come up with as many alternate hand signs as as I could think of, or the hands of recognizable characters. It was Des’s gag to have a dead muppet around Effie’s neck as a stole.

I remember this being a rare instance of my getting a lot more room for the art than I usually got. Art Director Sam Viviano was trying to condense Des’s script down to 6 pages and ultimately took it to MAD VP and Executive Editor John Ficarra to make the cuts. John decided to give the spoof an extra page instead, so Sam’s layouts included a number of wide, full page width panels. Thus, I got several big panels with lots of room for the art, and Des and I both got paid for an extra page!

I think that adding the internet famous “Grumpy Cat” to replace the Everdeen’s cat “Buttercup” as a running gag was my idea, but I don’t specifically remember.

I did do a special cameo on page 5, in the Tribute practice room scene. My good friends Keelan and Barbie Parham‘s daughter Brady was a huge Hunger Games fan, so I drew her as a tribute. She’s holding the two bladed battle axe on the far left, last panel above. She was about 15 at the time.

Just for fun, I did the clouds and shadows in thet third panel on the last page using ink washes rather than digital:

It gives things a more textural feel which I wanted for the stormy atmosphere. Here are the inks for that panel sans color:

That’s it for another miserable Monday MADness! Toon in next week for another movie parody visit to Middle Earth.