MADness #158: Action Comics!

Clicky to Embiggen…

Here we go with another useless look back at my work for MAD Magazine, and we are very rapidly catching up to present day. This piece appeared in MAD #44 Aug 2025, which was on newsstands in June. That was only 6 months ago! This was written by my CLAPTRAP cohort Desmond Devlin.

This issue was “Superman” themed, as it dropped right around the time the James Gunn “Superman” movie came out. It was yet another issue that featured multiple pages of new content (14 to be exact) all of which was Superman-centric. Des came up with this clever two pager where the guy who is running away holding his head on the cover of Action Comics #1 also became a character appearing in 80 years worth of comics like that other guy on the cover. The idea was to have him in the exact same pose and spot on covers of different genres of comics from various decades. This was a bit of a challenge for me as I had to capture the feel of all sorts of different art styles and eras, including the comic’s titles and cover graphics. Here’s the pencils:

The reason the EC comics cover in this “pencil” has the graphics and title all the way done is I found it easier to just do it at this stage than to pencil it out and then have to finish it. The others I penciled in the titles and basics of the covers along with the images. I also went ahead and did a recreation of that guy and made sure he was positioned as he in on the cover of Action #1:

My version of Running Away Guy

I could not find a decent enough image of that cover to just cut and paste the guy, so I had to do a recreation. I wanted to do it complete with the slightly mis-registered colors that had some of the blue lines peeking through, the weird pink discoloration on this forehead and the grainy texture. That may seem a little OCD considering he would be printed about 1 inch wide on the images in the magazine, but doing a visual spoof of something this specific only works if the subject is unmistakable. Plus I geek out on that sort of thing.

I found getting the look of the different art styles wasn’t too difficult. The hardest one was the early 1940’s “Marvel Mystery Comics” style, because that era didn’t really have a single distinctive look to it, and drawing the naked old people was essential to the gag but would not read as very 1940’s. Creating the title graphics for each of these was more of a challenge, because I had to do all that by hand and change the names to the spoof names. Here’s a close up look at each cover:

This one was my favorite to do!

That’s it for another episode! Toon in (maybe) next week as we close in on the present!