MADness 84: House of Cards!

After several weeks of never being in town to post one of these, we are back to our terribly tedious but thorough timeline trudge through my work at MAD Magazine. We are now entering 2015, and here’s another spoof of what was then the new frontier… streaming service television! This was another Netflix show, “House of Cards”, which depicted the world of heinous, criminal and corrupt politicians in Washington D.C… ah, 2015! How innocent we all were back then thinking this sort of thing was fiction. This appeared in MAD #532, April 2015.

Not much to say about this job except the show featured a very post “The Princess Bride” Robin Wright and a pre “The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel” Rachel Broshanan, as well as a pre-cancelled Kevin Spacey. This was also one of only a handful of spoofs I drew that was written by David Shayne, who was one of the magazine’s editors. Very occasionally an editor would do a credited writing piece in MAD. Most of the time their contributions went uncredited. I know some of that was because of independent contractor/freelance laws that made it complicated for an employee of the publisher to do the same work that a freelancer does. However that was either an old issue or they found a workaround, because David did several TV/movie parodies in 2013-2015, all of which I illustrated.

When I do my workshops I often use this spoof as an example of how you need to draw the same person over and over again in these continuities, at different angles and with different expressions. I use Spacey as the example:

These were all the caricatures I did of Spacey in this spoof. It’s impossible to get a reference pic of every any and expression I have to draw so I don’t even bother. I try to incorporate a couple of caricatures where I DID have a picture to work from, interspersed throughout the parody. I call these “keystone caricatures” and they are generally more detailed with a more precise likeness. Then in between these keystones I just fake it, making up the angle and expression but keeping focused on the important elements of the face to get a workable likeness, even if I take a lot of liberties.

That’s it for this week’s MADness! Toon in next week for a MAD movie parody that wasn’t a MAD movie parody because it didn’t get printed in an official issue of MAD but it was in an unofficial issue of MAD and I still got paid so it sort of counts!