MADness Bonus: Goodnight Batcave!

Welcome good citizens to another Moronic Monday of Mayhem as we look back at my work for MAD Magazine! We are actually going to take another break from work for actual issues of the magazine with yet another side project I did at this point in our chronological crawl, being spring 2016.

The MAD folks came up with an idea to do a series of parodies of children’s books set in the world of DC comics superheroes (spoiler: MAD is owned by DC!) They asked me to do the art for the first book, a spoof of Margaret Wise Brown and Clement Hurd‘s classic Goodnight Moon, written by MAD editor Dave Croatto. Being a big Batman fan I was delighted to get the assignment.

It was a little tough to figure out the visual approach. Usually when you spoof something like this the idea is to get as close to the visual look of the original as possible. But there was simply no way to do that with Hurd’s sparse and understated art style. We therefore concentrated on getting the colors and layouts right, and letting the art style be its own thing. I did a cover and some sample spreads as a kind of test, sticking to a bit more of a traditional comic book look to the characters:

This just did not feel right. The characters needed more of an exaggerated but cartoonish look to them. I did some experimenting with other approaches, and amid my doodles we found something that both myself and the editors liked:

This is based loosely on the “Batman: The Animated Series” look but more exaggerated and cartoonish. This seemed to be a funnier, more kid-orientated look, so I revised my sample spread with this approach:

This was a winner, and we finished the book using this approach to the characters. Dave did a fantastic job writing the spoof, getting the rhythm and cadences of the original to a tee. We mirrored the full bleed colored pages with the black and white vignettes as well. I think the final result turned out great. Here’s a few other peeks at some of the art:

I have to admit I did not think this would be a very big seller, but I underestimated the number of comic book geeks who had kids and who grew up reading “Goodnight Moon”. It actually sold pretty well and I believe is still in print. I still get people coming up to me at comic cons with copies for me to sign. A very fun project.

Objects in Review Mirror Dept.

I had to include this since the review sections of Amazon product pages are so entertaining. Of course many reviews are thoughtful, honest, and helpful to those considering buying a product. Then there are these:

This reviewer is not too bright, nor do they understand what a parody is. There are not a lot of words per page because there are roughly the same number of words as the source of the spoof has. It rhymes exactly as well as the book it is a parody of does. It was a sad day when Amazon removed all replies and reactions to reviews, and let people like Chris here share their misguided opinions without anyone being able to point out how dumb they are. So, I’m doing it here!

That’s it for another MAD Monday! Toon in next week when we return to the actual pages of the magazine and that two-for-one movie spoof I teased last week.