MADness #89: Green Lantern!

Here we go with another pathetic peek back at my work for MAD Magazine. This week is a look at one of the more unique movie parodies I’ve done for MAD, “Green Lantern” from MAD #510, August 2011. written by Desmond Devlin. It was not unique because of the film, but because of a rare instance of the MAD editors cutting a gag of mine, some experimenting on my part with my process, and a bizarre request for a cameo.

First, the MAD edit: This was my pencil rough for the splash page:

The “finger” ring construct was my gag. It’s not very often the editors step in and nix a gag I come up with, but in this case they never considered the finger gag as a possibility and immediately told me I needed to lose it. That rarely happens, but really that’s because I know what their boundaries are and I rarely try to test them. I didn’t think that gag would make it by the editors, but you can’t blame a guy for trying . . . just looking to be a little edgier. I had to rethink that one. Here’s the final inks:

And the final splash is at the top of the post. Yes, Ryan Reynolds is naked except for a jock strap and a mask throughout this spoof when he’s in Green Lantern mode. I did the costume with color like it was painted on him. That was a gag making fun of the awful looking CGI costume he had in the film. Here’s the pencil roughs of the other four pages:

The other reason this job was different was because I thought I’d experiment a little and try doing the story page inks at a smaller size (I stuck with the traditional size for the splash). MAD has traditionally worked at “twice up”, meaning the artist does the original art at 200% of the size it prints at. This is enormous compared to regular comic books, which are traditionally done at 130% of print size. The size of an original page from a movie or TV parody is about 16.75 x 21 inches. That’s really big and it takes a lot of time to ink that. I thought I’d give 150% of print size a try and see if it speeded me up and still gave me the look I wanted. Pages 3 through 6 measured about 12.5 x 15.75 inches. Here are the results:

My verdict? Meh. I thought in print it lacked the detail and sharpness I was used to getting when working at the larger size, especially when I did smaller faces and figures in panels that were long shots. I made it work but never tried the smaller sized originals again. Here’s the final art:

If you are wondering what happened to the second to last panel (incomplete inks and revised final), it’s because of the third odd thing about this parody. As I was working on the inks it was suggested to me to work these two guys in to the parody as Lanterns:

This was part of this “Mystery Hipster Cops” thing that was going on at the time.

Thanks it for another ridulous look back at my work for MAD! Toon in next week when we look at a TV parody, and the end of the longest streak of consecutive issues where I did a movie or TV parody.