MADness #152: The Batman!

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Welcome again clods to another installment of the rapidly closing trail of travesty that was my work for MAD Magazine…

Oh look! ANOTHER “Batman” assignment!

If you’ll recall our last two episodes featured a Batman cover and a two page Batman gag feature from MAD #23. It’s a good thing I am well versed in all things Batman! It was almost a year previous I did those two pieces for #23. Since then, nothing. Zero. Nada. Zip. Goose egg. Zilcho. It looked like maybe I was really done with MAD.

Then the 70th anniversary of the magazine happened, and the beancounters in the accounting department loosened their purse strings a little for some new content in MAD # 28, Oct 2022. MAD #1 hit the stands in October of 1952. 70 years of MADness! This issue would feature 10 new articles over 25 pages plus a fold out cover. Desmond Devlin and I did a full blown, real MAD movie parody… the first to appear in the magazine since “Awkward, Man” in issue #7. That was 20 issues and over 3 years earlier.

Des and I were a little more than halfway through doing CLAPTRAP when this was assigned to us, so it was interesting to put that work aside to do essentially the same sort of work for the magazine agin. That’s Des and I talking out of the window in the upper left.

I happen to have the scans of the raw inks for these pages:

I created the brick pattern in the corner of that building on the right digitally, so there’s a lot of blank space in the splash page inks. So much of the visuals of this film were the desaturated colors, rim lighting, and the incessant rain. Most of that was better served done in the coloring phase. That said, it was also a very dark movie with a lot of cast shadows, so I really did a lot of heavy dark areas with the inks.

See? Nary a bright color to be found.

It was fun to do one of these again for MAD, even if I was getting my fill of them doing CLAPTRAP at the time.

That’s it for another miserable Monday edition of MADness. Toon in next week when it only take three issues for me to get back in the saddle with another MAD cover!