MADness #92: First MAD Cover!

Yes… it’s the moment you have all been dreading! It’s the return that no one asked for of my Monday MADness retrospective of the work I did for MAD Magazine. If you’ll recall in our last episode we looked at MAD‘s spoof of “The Hunger Games: The Mocking Jay Parts 1 & 2” from MAD #538. Time to move on to MAD #539, June 2016, which featured my first ever actual MAD cover!

Covers are rare birds for several reasons. First, at that time there were only six a year. Second, Covers are usually of the hyper-realistic style of art and as Mark Fredrickson is a master of the type of look MAD wants he (rightfully) got 99% of the cover assignments. But, every once and awhile some unique cover concept is in need of a different style of art, so in those rare instances other artists get the nod.

I had done two covers for the short lived MAD Kids, one for a “Superman” special issue, and just prior to this job two “Bookazine” covers… so I was hoping those were a kind of trial run for me to get a real cover. I had been gently reminding the MAD guys for about 15 years that I’d really love to do a cover someday, so I was really pumped about getting that call. MAD Senior VP and Executive Editor John Ficarra told me that they had a cover concept that “was a perfect fit for my coloring skills”… I’m pretty sure that was an insult but I was so excited to get a cover I didn’t mind. Besides, I’d know something was really wrong if John didn’t insult me at every opportunity.

Anyway the above was the result. The coloring took forever, but I met the deadline!

The concept was pretty straight forward, making fun of the “Adult Color Book” craze that was all the rage at the time. It was to create one of those adult coloring book images with the crazy, dense patterns complete with Alfred coloring himself (badly) as well as the MAD logo and possibly other elements like the teaser copy. The Lovely Anna loves those coloring books, and has a stack of different ones along with about 200 different markers and coloring tools, so I had quite a lot of references laying about to see what kind of look was typical or representative of these books.

The editors send me a very comprehensive layout that pretty much had Alfred’s pose and placement figured out, so I had an easy job of it. After looking over some of Anna’s books that included realistic figures, I sent in this first sketch:

Although that look with the lines defining shadow areas is very typical with realistic figures in these coloring books, it was decided they wanted a simpler look so Alfred would stick out more from the background. I drew a sampling of a background pattern so they could see what I had in mind. I also added more MAD icons than their initial comp had, like the Zeppelin and the six fingered hand.

The second sketch:

This one went over well, with just a little tweaking.

At that time all MAD covers got “animated” for the digital version of the magazine, so I had to do everything in separate layers for that purpose. Initially I did the pattern a little too dense so I redid it with breathing room. I only did 1/4 of the page as a pattern but the edges are very organic and closed off, allowing them to easily overlap and create a full page pattern that could be manipulated as needed.

The editors were not sure if they wanted the pattern to stop just above the logo so the teaser copy they would add would not be on top of the pattern, so I left it open up there but they could easily place more of the pattern at the top if they wished.

Each separate MAD “Icon” element had a border around it so it could be moved about if needed to accommodate any graphics or type the editors needed to add:

Alfred himself needed a much thicker exterior line and bolder interior lines to help separate him from the background:

I also added spaces for the UPC info, the “ind” and the copyright symbol in the logo by incorporating them into the pattern for the completed black and white version:

I considered using actual crayons to do the color part, but after a little experimenting decided it was going to be too tricky to scan the color elements in and get them on their own layer (which was required for the digital version). So I found a couple of tutorials online on how to create a wax crayon effect in PhotoShop, did a little experimenting with that and ended up with a fairly convincing look:

My current cover count is six, so who knows? I may get another one someday. Toon in next week when we get back inside the magazine, this very issue in fact, and take a look at another movie parody that would tie my longest number of pages for a single feature that I set way back in 2002… 9 pages!!