In Honor of “The Hobbit” Premiere…

Cover image courtesy of Doug Gilford

SF Weekly’s Sherilyn Connelly revisits MAD various parodies of The Lord of the Rings, including the musical version spoof by Frank Jacobs and Mort Drucker from MAD #210. I like how she points out that, in the time it takes to watch The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey, one can read the first six chapters and more of The Hobbit book on which the movie is based . . . or all the MAD parodies of Tolkien put together. All the Peter Jackson LotR film parodies were written by Desmond Devlin with art by Hermann Mejia. Some of my favorite parodies from the last decade in MAD.

The above is the cover for MAD #428, art by Dale Stephanos. In that same issue I did the art for an article entitled “MAD Sizes up the 2003 Oscars- Best Picture”, which included a Lord of the Rings gag:

The above was not my first sketch, however. I submitted the pencil sketch below initially, but it got nixed because (unbeknownst to me) a similar gag was being used for the cover: