MADness #88: Modern Family!

It’s another MAD Monday, which means it’s also time for another step on our long and excruciating wander through my work at MAD Magazine! This week we look at another TV parody, this time of the Emmy winning comedy “Modern Family”, written by Arnie Kogen and first appearing in MAD #509, June 2011.

My very first job in published work was in 1990 for a comic book company called NOW Comics doing pencils for a title called “Married… with Children”, which was based on the popular FOX TV show. I did about 600 pages of that title and it’s related comic book specials, so I was no stranger to drawing Ed O’Neill. He of course played grumpy family patriarch Al Bundy on that long ago TV show, and on “Modern Family” he plays… wait for it… the grumpy family patriarch!

This twenty years older Ed O’Neill had a lot less hair and a lot more wrinkles, but his expressions and mannerisms were so much the same drawing him was like going back in a time machine.

Doing a spoof of a comedy is always difficult. Not for me, really, but for the writer. My job is essentially the same… caricature, storytelling, background gags, etc. If I do anything different with the art on a satire of a comedy it might be slightly more over-the-top in terms of action and body language, and sometimes exaggeration of the caricatures. Things are a little more cartoony or zany.

Sadly there was really no place to work in cameos of the rest of the “Married… with Children” cast. The only scene taking place outside the homes of the characters was the department store scene on panel one page six, and the gag required me to make the other shoppers male and ogling Sophia Vergara.

This job featured a rare instance where I asked to change the layout somewhat. In the original layout, the first panel of page five was an exchange between dad Phil and daughter Haley that was one single panel with the nested and connected word boxes. This would normally entail a single image with the two characters. I thought given the pacing of the gag, which is really four statements by dad and three “whatever” reactions by Haley with the fourth her being upset, plus the wide, short aspect ratio of the panel, it would be more effective to lose the connecting stems and do four different spot illustrations. Then I could show dad getting increasingly worked up and Haley rolling her eyes/etc in the first three, and deliver the punchline in the final image with a now sedate dad and a freaking out Haley. That same-basic-image repetition with the big reversal at the end was a Harvey Kurtzman staple back in the day. The little note and changes in the rough below is how I would pitch something like that to the editors. I guess they bought it, because that’s how we did it.

That’s it for another ridiculous Monday MADness. Check in next week for a look at another movie parody… and the story of one of the few times I butted heads with the MAD staff over a gag!