Monday MADness- The Hunger Games!

In honor of the opening of the latest “Hunger Games” film, here’ a look at 2012’s parody of the first movie. As always, clicky images to embiggen. The writer of the parody was Desmond Devlin.

First pencil rough

Above is the first pencil rough of the splash. This was a complex splash, because all the word boxes were being spoken by one person (Stanley Tucci’s host character “Cesear Flickerman”), there were a LOT of word boxes, necessitating three rows, and most of them described a character that needed to be near the box that describes them. So, I did something I seldom do . . . I drew the different elements separately and scanned them in as layers, allowing me to move and resize them as needed while the art dept played with word balloon placement. After some messing about, this second version was done:

Revised splash . . .

This worked better, and then I was able to go to finals. Here are the inks (final at top of post):

Hunger Pains inks

Here are some pencil roughs of other pages:

Pencil roughs page 3

Pencil roughs page 4

If I remember correctly, I really got behind on this job for some reason so for the last two pages, the roughs are REALLY rough, like barely there at all. In fact I added labels for the characters rather than attempt anything more than a circle for the heads or a scribble. I just needed the MAD editors to sign off on the bare-bones basics and I would do the heavy lifting on the final art:

There was a short period of time, right after MAD‘s iPad app came out, where the editors asked me to not draw the word boxes in the art anymore. This was supposed to have something to do with some sort of animation they were going to have in the iPad version of the issue, but that never really happened so eventually I went back to doing the word boxes myself. This job has no work boxes, however. Here are the final story pages: