Monday MADness: American Idol #2!

Again in honor of the final season of “American Idol”: As mentioned last week, I have done two pieces about “American Idol” in MAD… here’s the earlier one I did from MAD #440, April 2004, written by Greg Leitman. I would have posted some of the preliminary drawings but I guess all sketches/roughs for this are lost to posterity.

Lots of private cameos in this one. Those are my kids’s names on the blackboard along with “Max Korn” and good friend Brady (Parham). Brady’s parents, caricaturist/illustrator Keelan and wife Barbie are in the center with a Tiki idol between them (inside joke). The guy wringing out the towel at the top is (was) a young caricaturist named Brad, and I can’t for the life of me remember his last name nor why I put him in here. The ventriloquist is MAD art director Sam Viviano and is dummy is associate art director Ryan Flanders.