Sunday Mailbag: No Editors?

Q: How has the experience of doing parodies for your book CLAPTRAP without the art department and editors from MAD’s involvement been like? 

A: Those schmucks? It’s been like a giant weight lifted off our shoulders! Like running through fields of flowers on a sunny summer day with the birds chirping and a song in our hearts!

We hate it.

All kidding aside there are pros and cons to not working with the MAD editorial/art department on these parodies. The pros are that we can do whatever we want, and are free to maybe take some risks or try different things that would likely not have flown with the MAD staff, especially in the latter days. The cons are the staff at MAD really knew what they were doing, and their input always made our pieces better. From the art side, I don’t think anyone will notice a radical difference in my approach to the visuals in CLAPTRAP as opposed to what I might have done for MAD, mostly because after 20 years of working with art directors Sam Viviano and Ryan Flanders, what they wanted to see and what I wanted to do had become very close to the same thing. They trained me well. If anything, I am spending more time doing what I want to achieve what I want visually with the art.

There will be some noticeable breaking away here and there from the traditional MAD visual structure and that is always exciting. It’s challenging to get outside your comfort zone and try something new. Our goal with CLAPTRAP was always to do something that was at once recognizable as a traditional movie parody, but to add some little twists here and there. 

Thanks to Andreas Ulanowsky 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!