MADness #95: The Last 100 Days of the Obama Presidency!

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Here we go with another moronic MAD Monday look back at my work for MAD Magazine! This week we get away from the world of movie and TV parodies when we look back at the art for a political piece called “The Last 100 Days of the Obama Presidency”, written by Jeff Kruse and Kenny Keil, and first appearing in MAD #542, Dec 2016.

Jeff and Kenny were two writers I didn’t work with much during my MAD run. Jeff started writing for MAD just a few years before I started drawing for them, and was pretty prolific, doing both full articles and short stuff for “The Fundalini Pages”. Kenny started much later with MAD in the early 2010s, and did a lot of Fundalini stuff and a nunber of features, but is probably best known as the writer of the short lived “Dewey Derwin Destroys the World!” feature.  That was illustrated by Justin Peterson and appeared in the last 7 issues of the NYC produced MAD. “Dewey Derwin” was serial comic book style feature that I thought was clever and fun but never really fit in with MAD IMO. It just seemed out of place, even though it was really well done.

Anyway Jeff and Kenny did a great job with the gags in this piece. I would have liked to have worked with them more.

These kinds of spot illustration jobs, where I do vignetted small images to accompany various gags in the story, are infinitely easier to do than TV and film spoofs. All the images are necessarily simple, with little environment and focused on “selling” a single gag. Chicken fat gags are actually distracting and usually detrimental to the feature as a whole, so all the visual humor has to come from the drawing itself. I try to think of ways to just make the image itself funny while still matching the written gag and not resorting to chicken fat.  Things like making the secret service guys in the basketball scene so big as to be bending the rim up from underneath, and having them playing in their underwear and looking bored (like they don’t really want to do this, but Obama made them on the spot) and still wearing dress shoes and socks, their guns, shades, etc. Having them be that huge compared to Obama is all I needed to do to “sell” the losing 800-3 joke, but the rest of it makes the art funny just to look at and adds a little to the “story”. Likewise making Mitch McConnell as hideous as possible in his nakedness and the expression on his face makes that image work.

As much as I loved doing the film/TV parodies, I did like doing these kinds of jobs now and then. They were far less labor intensive… and they paid the SAME PAGE RATE.

That’s it for another edition of “Monday MADness!”. We are nearing the end of the NYC era… only 8 more issues to go! Toon in next week for a return to the world of “The MAD 20″ with another political piece making fun of the most aptly named politician ever, Anthony Weiner!