MADness #92.5: The Force Awakens!

Happy Monday! Time to continue on with our excruciatingly slow crawl through the decades of my work at MAD Magazine. The force is definitely NOT with us this week as we look back again at MAD #439, June 2016. Why a second look? Because I did two things for this issue!

Looking back, MAD #439 was a groundbreaker for me for two reasons. As I detailed in our last installment, it was the first time I got to do the art for the cover of a regular issue of MAD. The second reason was for another bucket list moment… doing the art for a parody of a Star Wars film!

I was 11 years old when Star Wars hit movie theaters in 1977. That was arguably the perfect age for the film to have maximum impact on me. I distinctly remember the moment my pal Guy Tolle and I saw it for the first time. His dad worked at the local movie theater in Oregon, WI. and we were allowed to hang out at the theater and watch a matinee showing of  “Star Wars” the week after it came out. It was the first week of summer vacation from school, so it was a weekday and there was not a lot of people in the theater for the early matinee. We set up in center seats with boxes of popcorn in hand.  The opening “A Long Time Ago…” came on the screen, followed by the big booming score start with the film title, and then the scrolling intro. All that was cool and we were sitting there goofing a bit while watching. Then the camera panned down to show the edge of a planet. Then a spaceship flew past us with laser blasts coming after it from behind. We were enjoying the opening and stuffing popcorn in our mouths. Then the tip of the pursuing ship appeared. It kept coming, and coming, and coming, and coming. We both sat there with our mouths hanging open, dead still, popcorn dropping from our hands that had only made it half way to our mouths. I was hooked from that instant forward. Guy and I watched Star Wars 56 times in that theater over the course of the summer, often three shows a day. I can still recite most of the dialogue by heart.

So, when I got the assignment to draw the spoof of “The Force Awakens”, inside the issue I had done my first cover for no less, it was kind of a big deal for me. I was also just becoming a MAD fan at the time, so I would go on to love all the Star Wars spoofs they did over the years as much as the movies. I was ecstatic to get to do one of them. “Star Bores: The Snores Awaken” was written by David Richards.

I was a little disappointed that there was not a traditional two page opening spread. For me, that was always the quintessential beginning to a MAD spoof. They opted instead to do a single page opening with the “scroll” with Greg Grunberg and J.J. Abrams at the bottom. Not a very strong opening IMO. But we made up for it on the next two pages:

Clicky any to embiggen…

That was a real tough one to lay out with three rows of word boxes and two inset panels. I had to cheat the perspective to make it work. I had some fun with the evening desert color palette and the light from the blasters and flamethrower.

The deadline was pretty tight for this, and it was NINE pages! So I did very simple and sketchy roughs, and did much more of the heavy lifting with the drawing on the final boards before inking. So following that two page spread, I scanned in the final pencils on the big boards and sent those in for review by the staffers for the next four pages:

It’s pretty rare I actually have scans of the final pencils. That’s usually a stage only I see. So, it’s your lucky day (I guess).

I then started running out of time, so I did a kind of combo rough and penciled version of the last two pages to send in to the MAD folks:

The gag for panels 5 and 6 of page 8 called for inserting some art from the original Star Wars parody by Harry North, so I got those panels off! That and the really easy page 1 made this not as time consuming a job as a true nine pager would have been, but this still tied my record for longest piece in MAD with “Harry Plodder and the Lamest of Sequels”, back in MAD #424. It was a lot of fun to get to do a Star Wars parody for MAD.

That’s it for this week’s MADness, young padawan. Toon in next week for a look at the MAD job that almost broke me, and really pissed off my wife The Lovely Anna, which is hard to do.