Sunday Mailbag- Star Wars Cover?

Q: Why didn’t MAD Magazine approach you to design a Star Wars themed cover for their latest issue (#539) considering the excellent work you did illustrating The Force Awakens parody? 

A: First, thanks for the kind words about my art on the “The Force Awakens’ parody. Glad you liked it.To answer your question, MAD had just done a Star Wars cover a couple of issues earlier so no doubt they felt they didn’t want or need another so soon, even if  the issue did contain the actual film parody. You see that a lot these days. The magazine will have a movie cover subject on whatever issue is going to be on the stands when the film comes out, even though any parody they might do is still months in the future. It’s a way of connecting with a timely and hot subject matter and maximizing cover appeal. They will have some interior feature that covers the subject as well… possibly a Sergio “A MAD Look at (movie title)” or some other article that is not the parody. Then months later when the parody appears in the magazine something else is on the cover. In fact the last time I remember having the cover tie in to a movie parody I had done and which was contained within was MAD #510 which had Alfred as the Green Lantern on the cover and Desmond Devlin and my parody of that film inside. That was in 2011.

Thanks to Glenn Robinson 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!