Sunday Mailbag- Doing Layouts?

Q: While at MAD, you always received boards with the word balloons already configured. Now with CLAPTRAP, you get scripts directly from Desmond and I assume the laying out of those balloons falls into your hands. I’m curious how you find that new responsibility?

A: MAD‘s art staff always did the “mechanicals” as they called them for the parodies I drew, although I only received them on actual art boards for the first year or so I worked for the magazine. Ah, those were the days! In fact, the first few parodies I did not only did MAD send me the art boards with the gutters and word boxes already penciled into place by Lenny “The Beard” Brenner, but that package also included a file folder full of reference pics from the show/movie we were spoofing. What service! Then everybody got lazy and I had to do all the board work and reference stuff myself, but they still did the mechanicals and just emailed me the layouts. This is typical of what a “mechanical” would look like from MAD:

As you can see, all the word boxes are placed and the panel sizes set based on how much text is needed, story requirements, etc. This is a lot of work, and most of it was done by MAD art director Sam Viviano back in the NYC days, and by MAD art director Suzy Hutchinson for the brief time they did these in Burbank.

They are time consuming to do and sometimes are like trying to solve a puzzle when trying to get things to work out best, but they are really not all that hard once you understand the rules. I ended up helping Suzy with the first few she had to lay out just because she was unfamiliar with the MAD format rules, but she quickly caught on.

MAD always lined the word boxes up on the same horizontal across each row of panels relative to the top of the panels, and then 99% of the time the boxes were always the same depth panel to panel. The “nesting” method they used meant conversations within a panel consisted of word boxes connected by stems, and the bottoms of the “low” boxes in each nested cluster lined up on a horizontal. So in laying it out, you have to decide how best to distribute the text as to width of the boxes and how many lines deep to go. You can also stack the nested boxes side by side or top and bottom.

Of course it was better for me to just get these mechanicals handed to me all ready for me to start drawing, but I don’t mind doing them. In fact, as I lay out the panels and pages, I am already thinking about what I’d like to draw in them and can take that into consideration when designing the page. In fact, I am using a little bit of a backward approach to the process from what I did with MAD. With the magazine, I was given a rigid, structured mechanical that I could not deviate from, and was forced to draw the art into exactly what I was given to work within. With CLAPTRAP, I start out doing VERY loose roughs of the pages, setting up the panel layouts and sizes and basic image ideas on the page. Then I do the mechanicals, trying to fit the word boxes around the art, rather that the opposite. Once I get the mechanicals set, I do the real pencils and move on to finished art.

Thanks to Dominic Nunziato for the question. If you have a question you want answered for the mailbag about cartooning, illustration, MAD Magazine, caricature or similar, e-mail me and I’ll try and answer it here!