MADness #156: The Fascist and the Feeblest!

Here we go with another look back at what passed for my career with MAD Magazine! In this episode we have a gander at the first genuinely NEW piece I’d done for the interior of the magazine (not including tributes to deceased members of the Usual Gang of Idiots) since the movie parody of “The Batman” for MAD #28 AKA the 70th anniversary issue… TWO YEARS PRIOR. That’s right, MAD had a full on two years of essentially no new content and really almost four years if you exclude that anniversary issue. This issue was coming out right as the 2024 elections took place, so the powers-that-be at DC opened their wallets to have some new election cycle stuff in MAD #40, Dec 2024. That included this piece written by my CLAPTRAP co-conspirator Desmond Devlin. This is kinda-sorta a spoof of the “Fast and Furious” movies but not really. The basic premise was a car race between Joe Biden and Donald Trump with plenty of gags.

I ended up doing the layouts for the two page spread that encompassed pages 2 and 3 of this one, because the scene was so chaotic it made more sense for me to do it with the word boxes and placement. Fortunately I had gotten a lot of practice doing it for CLAPTRAP:

There’s a lot going on it that spread. I had to nix at least one of Des’s gags (a funny one with Clarence Thomas and an RV) but I could only fit in so much stuff.

This feature went through the wringer, let me tell you. Des wrote it in July of 2024, and the race showed both Biden and Trump going to the finish line. Then of course on July 21 Biden withdraws from the race and Kamala Harris takes over as the Democratic nominee. That caused a hasty rewrite. Nothing changed until panel five of page 4 though. After that Des had to rewrite it all with gags about Harris and current electoral shenanigans.

Of course with the issue going to press in September we didn’t have a winner of the race. It wasn’t as bad as the bet hedging we were forced to do with MAD #401, Jan 2001.

I don’t have anything other than a hunch that the new material we did for this issue might have jump-started the eventual return to inclusion of new material in EVERY issue, which we have been getting since MAD #43. Regardless, in our next episode MAD take a welcome step in the right direction by starting a run of new content in every issue. Stay tooned!