Sunday Mailbag- Rounded MAD Word Boxes?
Q: Your new MAD parodies now have rounded corner dialogue boxes. Why?
A: When the Burbank staff took over I was told they wanted to have rounded corners on all the word boxes in the parodies. So we went from this:
From “Rough One”, MAD #545
To this:
From “Star Bores: Half Assed Jedi”, MAD #1
Why? No reason other than just to give it a little bit different look, I guess. I was not given a real reason. It serves no functional purpose, so just aesthetics.
It’s a huge pain in the ass for me, since I hand ink these balloons. Now instead of nice, easy square corners, I have to get out my circle templates and ink rounded corners. I’m getting better at it, though!
Thanks to Kevin Richlin 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!
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This seems like one of those things where you’d want the computer’s capability to create these after the illustration. Being able to size and move the balloons around to your need (now with rounded corners). Any reason you still do it by hand? Is it for aesthetics too? Interesting to see the process as always.
This reminds me of how I’ve heard in animation the best thing is when cartoonists write the stories visually with storyboards because as cartoonists they actually understand what is possible and not possible with animation for the animators. But the worst thing is when a live action writer, that cannot draw cartoons, writes a script in words. Because they will very casually write a sentence such as, “Then a thousand people run by.” Having no understanding that drawing an entire thousand people will take a whole crew of 20 people half a year to animate when the deadline, budget, and crew is very small. Because they don’t draw cartoons so they don’t understand the medium nor understand the point of view of the artists.
Maybe a better example that sums up the entire entertainment industry’s biggest problem when people put no thought into the other people that have to actually make something is the old joke of somebody writing a western movie and casually writing half the movie with only the sentence, “Then the indians take over the fort.”