Sneak Peek: “Snark Tank” from MAD #529

As promised, here’s a sneak peek at my art from the Dick DeBartolo scribed parody of “Shark Tank” in the latest issue of MAD (clicky any to embiggen…):

If you are familiar with the show, it’s a reality series where hopeful entrepreneurs pitch product ideas to a panel of rich business people, who then either reject them or bid on investing in a portion of their concept. Most of the time the entrepreneurs are inventors of some process or idea, thus the scene with lots of inventors both dead and alive (mostly dead).

Dick also wanted to use a couple of people he works with as some of the pitch teams, including his co-host of “Giz Wiz” Chad Johnson, and The Tech Guy’s Leo Laporte (who is in that last panel with his fiancee Lisa).

There was one other couple who pitched an idea in the script, and they were not supposed to be anyone specific according to Dick De. So, just for fun I had it be The Lovely Anna and I (see the second panel above). The editors even changed the names in the script to “Anna” and “Tom”, so we are officially in the parody.

As it turns out I also appear with one of my dogs McCartney as one of the twitter avatars in the article “When Twitter’s Maximum Character Rule Saves People From Saying Too Much”, photo by The Lovely Anna. That was a surprise cooked up by associate art director Ryan Flanders, who saw the pic on facebook and asked Anna if they could use it. So there is an overabundance of Tom in this issue.

You can also see a sneak peek of this article featured on the website Zap2it, where I am credited as “colorist”. Usually they give me no credit at all, so I guess that’s better than nothing. 🙄