Monday MADness! NASCAR!

Apparently the 2014 NASCAR season starts this month… I don’t know for sure because I couldn’t care less about NASCAR. However, that doesn’t mean I can’t make fun of it, which is exactly what Desmond Devlin and I did in MAD #427 back in March 2003 with “Mad’s Proposed Rule Changes for the Upcoming NASCAR Season”. Here’s the final art for that two page feature (clicky any to embiggen):

And here’s a little bonus. Especially way back in my earliest days with MAD, art director Sam Viviano would often send me what he called “doodles” along with the print layouts to set up the art layouts as they envisioned them. Here’s Sam’s doodles of this piece:

If you compare my finals and Sam’s doodles, you will only see a few changes to the basic layouts. That’s because Sam is not only a terrific art director but a longtime MAD artist who’s forgotten more about this kind of thing than I’ll probably ever know, and he knows what he’s doing. It’s very seldom I feel something could be done differently than what he proposes in his doodles and have it work better. Change just for the sake of change is pointless, IMO.

Sam almost never does doodles for me anymore, probably because he:

a.) trusts me to be able to figure it out on my own after 13 years of working with MAD and
b.) wants me to earn my page rate without he doing half the work.