MADness #96.5: Sully!

Here we go with yet another moronic Monday of MADness and another installment of our look back at my work for MAD magazine. This is entry number 96.5 because this is the second of two pieces I had in MAD #543, Feb 2017. The first was one of the “MAD 20″ pieces for this year end issue (see our last installment!), and this other was a full parody of the movie “Sully”, written by MAD’s MADdest writer Dick DeBartolo!

For a number of years I used this parody as the example when I did a talk on how to do MAD movie parodies, mainly because of all the splash pages I had to work out, this one might have been the hardest one to put together. It doesn’t seem like it would be, does it? I mean, we have the plane crashing in the Hudson River and a bunch of people watching it making comments. Seems pretty straight forward.

It was not.

I should preface all this by saying that moving the word boxes around is not an option. In rare cases MAD allows “orphan” word boxes to float about, but the hard rule is that word boxes line up on horizontals across a splash page spread (and individual panels in the main story as well), and all the boxes on a given horizontal are the same height. Spacing between clusters of dialogue are used to separate conversations, but the boxes remain in a horizontal format.

The script called for the plane to be about to do its emergency landing in the river. That called for an exterior scene with the full plane. The only two people from the film that needed to be recognizable in the splash was Tom Hanks and Aaron Eckhart‘s characters… but they are FLYING THE PLANE. I solved that by doing some exaggerated perspective on the plane and making the cockpit windows far bigger than they really are so the faces of the pilots can be seen enough to do likenesses of the actors. That wasn’t so bad. It got a lot worse when trying to figure out how the other word balloons would work.

The other word boxes across the top of the splash are all being spoken by either crew or passengers INSIDE the plane… you know, the one I had to draw from the outside? Worse yet, the first three word balloons on the bottom row are ALSO supposed to be coming from people INSIDE the plane.

The next three word balloons across the bottom are coming from bystanders on the shore of the river watching the crash happen. This is several hundred yards away from the plane, where I am required to draw close enough for the faces of the pilots to be visible! But wait! It gets better! The last two word balloons are being spoken by people in a car on the bridge the plane just flew over, easily half a mile from the plane!

Fortunately none of the gags Dick wrote for the crew/passengers really needed any visuals to “sell” them, so I could just have all the tails from all these balloons coming from the porthole windows along the fuselage of the plane.  That works because they are all part of a buzz of talking from the crowd inside the plane. Having to extend the tails from the three bottom left balloons all the way across the page past the gutter of the spread was less than ideal, but it isn’t too distracting nor crosses over important imagery. The gag from the people on the shore where the guy gets angry that the plane got in the way of his picture of the Manhattan skyline (more on that in a second) DID need some visual elements to “sell”. It’s a much stronger joke if the art shows the guy holding a camera with an angry expression, and the plane about to crash and maybe kill everyone onboard and the skyline is there as well. I cheated this by moving the plane a lot closer to the shore and having everyone standing on a pier over the water. Finally the “EZ Pass” gag from the bridge works even if you don’t see the vehicle or people talking. I just needed to be sure I showed that the plane had just passed over the bridge. I accomplished that with the smoke trail in the sky.

Add in the floating head Tom Hanks narration, the visual references to his other movies that his narration demanded, some other chicken fat and cameos (that’s Dick DeBartolo himself in his boat on the right), and other chicken fat, and I thought I had figured out this rather complex layout. This is the pencil I send to MAD:

I got a call from art director Sam Viviano shortly thereafter to tell me they all loved the splash but there was one technical problem. With the placement of the city and the bridge relative to the river, the plane is landing in the wrong direction from what actually happened. From this point of view, the city on the opposite shore would be New Jersey, not Manhattan.

I asked if the gag could be switched so the photographer references his picture of the New Jersey skyline being ruined, instead of Manhattan.

I was informed no one takes pictures of the New Jersey skyline. So, we just left it as is, figuring no one would notice.

I received at least a dozen emails from native New Yorkers telling me the plane was landing in the wrong direction. :/ Here’s the inks for that splah:

The rest of the parody went along just fine:

This would end up being the last movie parody I would do with Dick DeBartolo. Just three issues later I would illustrate my last piece written by Dick. That’s Dick talking to Sam Viviano at the bottom of the last page in the crowd scene, BTW! Dick’s husband Dennis is right above him in between the word boxes.

Meanwhile, toon in next week for another riveting tale of MADness with another visit to the Family Circus!