Sunday Mailbag: No Superheroes?

Q: I am somewhat surprised by the fact (as of right now), there are no superhero movies in your upcoming CLAPTRAP book. Don’t get me wrong, I love superhero movies and I don’t want to sway you guys in anyway, I’m just somewhat surprised. Any reason why not?

A: In case anyone reading this is new to my blog, MAD writer Desmond Devlin and I successfully crowdfunded a book of traditional styles movie parodies we call CLAPTRAP, which we are diligently working on for release later this year. So far 11 of the 12 movies we are spoofing have been revealed, with one still to be decided, and yes, there are no superhero movies included. Click here for all the details on the project.

Des and I have nothing against superhero movies. I love superhero movies, even the bad ones, as I am a comic book geek from way back. However when we decided due to the lack of new movie releases to do all retro parodies of films that MAD never did, this opened us up to 80 years of possible films, the vast majority of which were way before superhero movies became all the rage. If we had a choice between doing “Goodfellas” and “Ant Man and the Wasp”, that choice seemed pretty obvious.

All that said, Des and I are also a little tired of doing superhero movie spoofs. MAD did a lot of them. In fact of the 46 movie parodies I drew for MAD, 16 of them were superhero movies. I also drew a lot of “sort of” superhero movies like ‘Terminator 3″, ‘Van Helsing”, all the Hunger Games and a number of Star Wars movies. Superhero movies are basically sci-fi/fantasy action films, so if you include all the other films that fit that bill then a whopping 33 of the 46 movies spoofs I did were of that ilk. In fact, for much of my time with MAD I used to make fun of the fact that if a movie didn’t feature a cape, a wand, a sword, or a laser gun, MAD wasn’t interested in doing a parody of it. In later years MAD concentrated more on these “event” box office tentpole films rather than more critically acclaimed but less flashy movies.

You can’t blame MAD for doing that. They almost had to go that direction because of the short time latter day films tended to stay in both theaters and the consciousness of the public, and the fact that it took MAD 3-4 months to get a spoof of a movie in front of readers.

Back in the day movies used to premier in the major cities like New York or LA on single screen theaters, and run for months until everyone got a chance to see it. It would debut in the next tier of towns like Minneapolis or Denver or whatever a week or two later, then continue to trickle down to smaller and smaller towns until it was playing in Pokey, South Dakota population 162 people and one mule named Trixie. In that manner a movie was around for many months and still just being seen for the first time by many. As a result MAD‘s spoof of a film was still very relevant even four months after its release.

Today a movie debuts on 4,000 screens including the little theater in Pokey, and even the big tentpole films only last a month or two in the theater before the next wave of event films startup to take their place. Only the really big, highly anticipated movies were still relevant enough for MAD to publish a spoof up to four months later and have anyone care about reading it. So, those are the kinds of films MAD mostly did.

We did do some other kinds of movies as well. ‘American Sniper” and “Sully” come to mind, but they were rare. In fact I drew “American Sniper” in 2015. The next earliest non sci-fi/fantasy/action drama I did was “Brokeback Mountain” in 2006. That’s nine years of capes, wands, swords and ray guns. Of course MAD had other artists doing spoofs so I am not sure what other genre films were done during that time, but not too many.

Anyway that’s all to say that we are kind of enjoying giving superhero flicks a break in CLAPTRAP. I will say we are considering a few for that 12th spoof, including “Black Panther”, “Wonder Woman” and “Avengers: Endgame”, but with a long list of great films from the last eight decades to choose from, I’m not sure any of those make the cut. We will see.

Thanks to Grant Jobe 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!