MADness #79- The Hobbit 2!

“It’s a dangerous business, Frodo, going out your door. You step onto the road, and if you don’t keep your feet, there’s no knowing where you might be swept off to.”– Bilbo Baggins.

Truer words were never spoken, especially regarding this seemingly never ending slog through my work for MAD Magazine! Here’s we are… another Monday and another look back at a middling art job on another middle earth film parody. This time it’s “The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug”, written by my CLAPTRAP cohort Desmond Devlin and first appearing in MAD #527, June 2014.

I often use this splash page as an example of how the MAD process of doing comic book style storytelling can present some tough challenges. Traditionally with comics, the script describes the story and the dialogue is not set in stone. The artist starts with a completely blank page and creates a visual story from the script, designing panels and scenes to move the story along. Then the pencilled pages go back to the writer, to will finalize the dialogue to work with the visuals. Then the word balloons and copy are added around the art. Art first, word balloons second.

Not so with MAD. When I do one of these parodies, or “continuities” as they call them in the office, I get the entire story in layouts with all the final word boxes and copy already set. Like this:

I have very little wiggle room with the layouts. I might be able to move the rows up or down a little, but the order and placement of them are almost never negotiable. There is a rhythm to humor, and some gags won’t work as well in a different order. Often the gag in one box is dependent on some set up in a previous box. Basically with MAD the artist has to draw to suit the word boxes and dialogue, not the other way around.

This splash is a good example. Most of these word boxes are associated with a specific character, so I am forced to draw that character at or near their box. That was pretty easy for the most part with this splash, since the scene called for is the barrels-down-the-river battle scene. I could draw any of the barrel riders anywhere in the water, and I had a near and far bank to place the other characters. Easy, right? The problem was Smuag the dragon’s placement. His box was at the bottom of the right page. Dragons are big and usually in the sky, not in a river. My solution was to drastically cheat Smaug’s scale and have him leaning over the river, into the scene.

Here’s the rest of the feature, and my pencils:

That’s it for another moronic Monday MADness! Toon in next week when we return to the world of TV satires featuring detectives, swamps, wicker, and serious weirdness.