MADness #82 1/2- The Big Bang Theory!

Don’t go getting your quarks all in a bunch… I know it’s Monday and that means it’s time to get our hadrons on and examine more of the decaying matter that was my work for MAD Magazine. This week we pick up where we left off last Monday, and look at the other piece I had in MAD #503, May 2010. That was a very short parody of the TV sitcom “The Big Bang Theory”, written by my CLAPTRAP cohort Desmond Devlin.

The part about this job I remember most was trying to figure out the best way to handle the “chalkboard” caricatures that were introducing the main characters via the narrator, Albert Einstein. Knowing that if I just used white linework on the chalkboard it would look like a photo negative image. I tried to pitch this approach to the editors, where eraser smudges and chalk were used to create a sort of painted look:

This was quickly dismissed since it would imply Einstein was a competent artist in order to pull that off, and for all we knew he’d have trouble drawing stick figures. Plus it didn’t look convincingly like it was done in chalk. So, we went with the white chalk line art instead. To create that look I did simple line art caricatures of the five main stars in pencil:

Then I scanned them and replaced the black with white for the chalk look.

It looks odd but that’s what they wanted. The other two pages were more straight forward:

The show’s creator Chuck Lorre is a huge fan of MAD, and anytime one of his shows got spoofed int he magazine he would want the original art. He contacted me about the art to this one, and like we did when I did the art for the parody of his show “Two and a Half Men”, he got the original splash page art and I got a print of the splash page signed by the cast:

That’s it for another scientifically enlightening episode! Toon in next week when we take a brief step onto a side path and go completely to the dogs!