Sunday Mailbag: MAD Pitches?

Q: This question is prompted by your recent Care Bears post … I haven’t seen you talk in your blog before about pitching your own ideas to MAD. Did you do this often, and did many get picked up?

A: Actually that may have been my first and last pitch for a completely independent piece for MAD. I do not remember ever doing that before or since. It never really occurred to me to even try pitching my own features or gag ideas to them, because I was usually very busy doing the art for features they assigned to me that others wrote.

I regularly pitched visual gag ideas to them within the movie and TV parodies I drew, of course. When I sent in my pencils for approval, they would include all my ideas for background gags and chicken fat. Very seldom were these rejected, mostly because I knew what the editorial staff would approve and what they would not, so I seldom pushed the boundaries. Things that did get rejected usually were because they were unclear or a little bit too much of a non sequitur.

One very prominent gag I pitched was for the cover of #548, which was the “Stranger Things” cover I did. In the pencils I sent in, Alfred (as the character “Eleven” from the show) had the ubiquitous nosebleed that the character always had when she used her powers:

The editors wanted me to remove the bloody nose. If I remember right they thought it visually conflicted somehow with the dark missing tooth gap in Alfred’s smile. I couldn’t quite figure that out since in color the blood would be red and look quite different from the dark gap, but they were the bosses. So this was the eventual final:

I still thought the bloody nose was too important an element from the show not to have in there, but they were pretty adamant they wanted no bloody nose. When I was doing the final a gag twist on the bloody nose thing came to me, so I turned in a second version of the final pitching that gag:

The Lovely Anna and I had a bet on whether the MAD gang would go with the booger gag or not. She won, as they loved it and that became the final cover:

I had a lot of examples over the years of “pitching” gags within the context of an assignment, but the “Care Bears” piece was the only cold pitch I did of a standalone piece.

Thanks to Lincoln Eddy 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!