MADness #96: Anthony Weiner!

No one is happy that today is both a Monday and the day after St. Patricks Day, but we here at Tom’s MAD Blog are ready to make things even worse for you with yet another episode of our cringey chronological crawl through Tom’s work at MAD. We’ve reached the end of 2016, and that meant another year end “MAD 20 Dumbest People, Events, and Things” issue. I had two pieces in this issue, this one being one of those extremely rare instances of a political piece that didn’t have anything to do with Trump. This feature first appeared in MAD #543, Feb 2017 and is by an uncredited writer… which means the editorial staff wrote it.

Imagine you were writing a book or story about a perverted politician who just couldn’t stop himself from sexting dirty photos all over the place to the point where he didn’t just get caught in the media once, not even twice, but THREE TIMES… the last one sexting a 15 year old girl and with his sleeping kid in bed next to him while he snapped the pics! You go to your editor and say “I’d like to name this character ‘Anthony WEINER’.” Your editor would tell you no way, that is too obvious and unbelievable a name. You literally could not make that up.

Well Mr. Weiner is indeed real, even if borderline unbelievable. This piece presented some challenges though, because I had to try and parody an actual movie promotional image and combine the animated character look with a caricature of Weiner. Here’s the actual “the Secret Life of Pets” promo we were trying to spoof:

Obviously we had to use the “Buddy” weiner dog character… that was what inspired the parody target in the first place. Actually combining the caricature with the dog face wasn’t all that hard because Weiner has a gigantic nose that is oddly shaped a lot like this dog’s nose, so I just “human-ed” that up a little and gave the dog Weiner’s human eyes, and a tuft of curly hair, a more human creepy grin, and that seemed to do the trick. Here was my first pencil sketch:

The idea when spoofing something like a movie poster or other recognizable visual image is to get as close as you can to the visual look of the target, and that makes the changes that are the parody part be all the more funny and effective. So our first attempt was to keep to the general posture of the dog’s body. That just wasn;t working. There was not enough of the “sexting” part in there to drive the gag home.

Fortunately the source image was one of many different promotional images for this film that featured several different characters and multiple dog poses and actions. We needn’t be tied to this one image of Buddy. There was a picture floating around the media at the time that was actually one of Weiner’s sexting pics showing his lower torso in a pair of tighty whities and his young kid next to him, where they used pixelated distortion on both his crotch and the kid. I used a variation of that image for the second pencil:

The editors wanted me to add the puppy with the pixel-distortion, and to change the collor tag to “Carlos Danger” because, and once again you just can’t make this up, that was actually Weiner’s online alias name. That’s how we ended up with the final:

That’s it for another eccch-cruciating episode! Next week we take a break from sharing work because it was at this time in the MAD timeline, March of 2017, that the news broke that MAD was finally going to be following the rest of DC comics out west to Burbank. I’m going to tell that story next Monday. Toon in then!