MADness #80: Beer Summit!

It’s “Happy Hour” somewhere in the world, even on a Monday, so let’s crack a brewski and have a look at another of the skunky and flat pours I did for MAD Magazine. This week we chug another cold one from the annual “MAD’s Twenty Dumbest People, Events and Things” feature, this time from the year 2009. This pint of suds first appeared in MAD #502, Jan 2010, writer uncredited. The subject was the arrest of Harvard professor Henry Louis Gates by Sgt. James Crowley for trying to break into his own house. After an escalating media fight with accusations of racial profiling, harsh comments from Obama that were then criticized by law enforcement, the President had both parties and VP Joe Biden discuss the issue at a patio table on the White House grounds over a beer that became known as the “beer summit”.

The concept here was to create a UFC style poster with Gates and Crowley as the combatants. I went straight from pencils to final digitally painted illustration as seen above, no inks were harmed in the making of this piece.

This has been another drunken episode of the pub crawl through Tom’s MAD career! Toon in next week for a rare occurrence indeed. I have not one, not two, but THREE separate pieces in the next issue!