MADness #87: Ray Donovan!

Welcome back to Monday MADness! For those following along at home, this is where I waste your time and valuable brain cells sharing the work I did for MAD Magazine over the years in chronological order. I haven’t one of these since late August, much to the relief of the half dozen people that actually still read this blog! Bad news–I’m back and here’s another entry on this long and utterly pointless trail of travesty.

Here’s a look at MAD‘s spoof of the Showtime show “Ray Donovan”, written by the great Arnie Kogen and first appearing in MAD #534, August 2015.

As I was working out this splash page I thought it would be fun to add an homage to a legendary Jack Davis piece of art featuring a boxing scene that has an interesting story.

On one of my first trips to the MAD offices (2000 or 2001) they opened up the flat files in the art department and pulled out a lot of great art that was still in their possession for some reason or another. One was this incredible black and white illustration by Jack:

That the illustration was originally done for a feature called “A Guide to the Better Understanding of the Fine Old Art of Boxing”, which appeared in MAD #26, Nov. 1955, and was written by Al Jaffee with art by Jack. It was not used but replaced by a very similar one:

Why the first illustration was not used and this second one was done seems to be a mystery. Know one I’ve ever asked about it knows. My guess is Jack (or possibly Harvey Kurtzman) decided that the boxer’s body pose/action in the first piece did not convey enough force in the proper direction to sell the gag of the other boxer’s head being launched off the page. Hard to believe anyone would abandon an unbelievable piece of genius like that for such a (IMO trivial) reason, but that’s my guess.

That original piece was finally used in MAD Super Special #70, Spring 1990:

Anyway I did an homage to that original image, which frankly blew me away when I first saw it all those years ago, in the splash page of this parody. It’s in the background upper right of the spread. Here’s a close up:

Likely no one noticed, but I did it as a tribute to Jack, who passed away less than a year later.

Sadly, this would prove to be my final collaboration with Arnie Kogen in MAD. Arnie wrote the spoof of the first movie parody I ever did for MAD, “Traffic” (“Traff-eccch”. MAD #405, May 2001), and he and I did 16 different movie and TV spoofs over the next 14 years (and one non movie/TV parody feature). Arnie actually did only one more job for MAD, a piece called “Decimated Survivor” drawn by Tom Bunk in MAD #545. That features was the last of a MAD career that started in 1959 and spanned 179 bylines. One of the great MAD writers IMO.

By the way, I don’t know all the issue numbers or dates or details of all these MAD issues… I barely remember what I had for breakfast. I use the same go to source for MAD research everyone else does, Doug Gilford’s MAD Cover Site and Mike Slaubaugh’s MAD Lists. If you don’t have these bookmarked you are no fan of MAD.

That’s it for another of the bloody, brutal beatdowns that are these looks back at my MAD work. Toon in next week when we return to the apparently unending world of Marvel superhero movies with yet another MCU spoof! We do have this bright spot to look forward to… this parody would prove to be the LAST Marvel movie I’d do a spoof of for MAD. ‘Nuff said!