MADness #153: The Medical Cover!

We are now deep in the MAD timeline where the magazine is basically 100% reprinted material, with only the cover and a Johnny Sampson Fold-In as new content. In the past year or two I got a chance to do a few covers, and this art for MAD #31, Jun 2023 is one of them. This issue was curated around a medical theme, featuring my art in spoofs of “Scrubs” and “Grey’s Anatomy” and lost of other pieces about doctors, hospitals, medicine, etc.

Although she didn’t take credit for it MAD head honcho Suzy Hutchinson wrote this cover gag, and it’s a pretty good one. I always prefer “Alfred doing something” cover gags to “Alfred substitution” gags. It’s easy and lazy to just replace some actor in character with Alfred, and then make the other characters from whatever source material they come from looking aghast or grossed out that Alfred is among them. Those kinds of cover can be clever if they include some sideways gag where Alfred is doing something Alfred-like as the character, and not just standing there, a cover gag like this one for #31 is more fun IMO.

This cover went through a number of revisions. It started out where the doctors in the background were just going to be ones from the spoofs and features reprinted inside the issue:

Dave Berg’s doctor from “The Lighter Side of…” joined docs from E.R., Scrubs and Grey’s Anatomy as the group getting mooned by a clueless Alfred. Then the E.R. parody got cut from the list of contents, and it was decided to do some cameos by other pop culture doctors instead:

So we added Dr. Zoidberg from Futurama, Dr. McCoy from Star Trek and The Doctor from Doctor Who (I picked Tom Baker, just for the iconic nature of his version). BTW I cheated Zoidberg’s height just to sort of squeeze him in… and he’s a lobster anyway. They are supposed to be small.

Then it was decided Tom Baker was too old school, and they wanted him replaced with… Dr. Dre???

I’m still scratching my head over that one. I would think Baker’s Doctor would be much more recognizable and suit the gag better than Dr. Dre… but I’m just the guy who does the art. I was also asked to “clutter up” the environment with some other hospital/doctor sight gags.

Someone recently asked me if I had a stock Alfred “head” which I just place in these covers and use again and again. I do not. I Have one I used for a number of WB Merchandise illustrations I did some years ago, but I (usually) do a new Alfred face for each new cover or illustration featuring Alfred. Very occasionally I have used a previous one and just touched it up to match the color or lighting when doing some image featuring Alfred, but it’s actually easier to just start from scratch most of the time.

This was my sixth cover for the actual magazine, which made me one of only 17 artists with six or more covers according to Mike Slaubaugh’s MAD Lists I’ve done one more cover for the regular magazine since, which believe it or not moved me up to #14 for the most MAD covers credited.