MADness #82- Orange is the New Black!

Wake up and hit the showers, jailbirds! It’s another MAD Monday, And that means it’s time for another look back at the hard time in the hole that was my work for MAD Magazine. Don’t worry, you are not really incarcerated serving life in a hellhole of despair and misery… it just feel that way every time you see these posts.

Last week we looked at a spoof of a TV show that was among my least favorite to have done for MAD. This week it’s a 180 degree swing, with a gander at one of my all time favorite MAD jobs. Here’s MAD‘s parody of “Orange is the New Black”, written by my CLAPTRAP cohort Desmond Devlin and first appearing in MAD #530, December 2014.

I mentioned last week what a head scratcher it was that MAD seemed to be ignoring top rated network TV shows in favor of doing spoofs of HGTV, reality and game shows. Actually they were pivoting away from standard network show towards the (then) new rage in narrative television programs… premium cable and streaming content. We’d already done spoofs of “True Detective” (HBO) and “Homeland” (Showtime), and this spoof was MAD‘s first foray into spoofing streaming service “binge” shows”. “Orange is the New Black” was crazy popular and a huge hit, and while it was not the first original show from Netflix (that was “House of Cards”, which we would spoof a few issues later) it was the first of it’s kind MAD went after.

This was an incredibly fun show to do. There is not a single face in the cast that was not fun to draw, and there was lots of room for crazy expressions, gags, etc. For example, I added a running gag where a chicken kept popping up in panels. In the show, there is a myth that a wild chicken lives in the prison grounds, and it is occasionally seen by characters but never confirmed as real. Anyway the chicken appears in a number of random panels in the spoof. You have to really be a fan of the show to get it.

This two page spread was also a lot of fun to put together. I’m not a big fan of starting a parody with a single intro page and then having pages two and three being the big two page spread. I like the opening of the parody to be the ‘punch you in the nose” type of high impact image. However in this case I thought it worked well.

This spoof was a long one at 8 pages (although only average length compared to the spoofs in CLAPTRAP). That’s a testament to how rich and engaging the show itself was. There was just too much great stuff that could not be left out.

You can always tell when I am running out of time with these pencils. They start to get sketchier and sketchier. That just means I am transferring time I would have spent at the “rough” stage to the final pencil stage. It’s actually better to do it that way, and the guys at MAD never needed anything more than the really rough sketches for the approval stage… I just get wrapped up in the drawing and then get up against the deadline.

That’s it, you’re on parole until next week! Toon in then for a return to the world of the “MAD Twenty”!