MADness #98: Rogue One!

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A long time ago, in a galaxy far, far away… it was a MONDAY! Just like it is today right here in this galaxy! That means it’s time to embrace the Dark Side of the Farce with another look back at my work for MAD Magazine. Today we have a peek at my second chance at spoofing a Star Wars movie… MAD‘s parody of “Rogue One: A Star Wars Story”, written by David Richards and first appearing in MAD #545, June 2017.

I know what you are thinking… who the %$#@& is “David Richards”?? Well, Mr. Richards wrote five pieces for MAD from 2005 to 2017, this being his last one. The name is a pseudonym and I mistakenly thought for a while it was senior MAD editor Jonathan Bresman. because while Jonathan spent many years on the MAD staff he also spent many years working for Lucasfilm… hence the Star Wars expertise, and that he didn’t want his real name on these features because he still had a working relationship with Lucasfilm. Turns out David Richards is NOT Jonathan Bresman, so there goes that theory. Anyway, you can all go one wondering who David Richards is… I mean besides being the writer of this very funny spoof.

George Lucas was known to be a big fan of MAD and would often buy all the artwork done of any of the spoofs of his films, or at least when that artwork was done by Mort Drucker. He was also known to hate caricatures of himself that exaggerated his total lack of a jaw line. Thus my original art had two strikes against it as regards appeal to him… I gave him his huge goiter neck and my name was not Mort Drucker. I am still waiting for his call about buying the original pages. C’est la Vie.

I remember having a lot of fun drawing Forest Whitaker as “Saw Gerrara” in this parody. His facial expressions are off the charts. Mads Mikkelsen is also plenty of fun to draw.

Not much else to say about this one. I was thrilled to do the art for “The Force Awakens” because it was Star Wars and the original 1977 movie was instrumental in my chasing a career in comics and visual storytelling. This one was not as much fun, even though it was frankly a much better movie than TFA.

I did love getting to draw Darth Vader, though. That was the best part.

I was a little disappointed that the editors nixed my visual gag on page 6 panel 4 with the Toy Story aliens. They decided it was too big a non sequitur from the story, but without some kind of “prizes” at the bottom of the shaft with the claw the gag falls flat IMO.

For quite a while in the 2000’s and early 2010’s having movie and TV parodies reach seven or more pages was rare. Editor Jon Ficarra likes to keep them shorter… I think he mourned the death of the attention span of the American youth. Fair enough, but this one did get to seven pages. Only a few more were that long or longer.

That’s it for another Monday MADness! Toon in next week for another TV spoof, this time of the game show variety!!