MADness #71: James Bond!

It’s Monday, and we have a license to be ill looking back at another piece of my work from MAD magazine. This week we spy out mini-parodies of not one, not two, but THREE James Bond films starring Daniel Craig in “Casebook: SPYFAIL- The Battle of the Bonds” from MAD #521, June 2013, written by my CLAPTRAP collaborator Desmond Devlin.

These penciled pages are true “roughs” as I just drew blank heads (and made notes as to who is supposed to be who.. although some might say I should do that even with my finished caricatures) and everything is very sketchy, meaning I must have worked out the caricatures and drew things out fully on the art boards.  These pencils were for demonstrating storytelling, gags and overall approach for review from the MAD staff, so I really never needed to send anything more polished than this. Despite that I seldom sent such rough work in, and I honestly cannot remember why I did in this case. I might have been given a short deadline so time was tight, or I might have been experimenting with less complete roughs to force myself to do more of the drawing on the boards, or something.

This was and interesting job because Des’s approach to squeezing three movies into one five page feature was to knit them all together using former Bond actors as narrators, mostly denigrating Craig’s depiction of the character and pointing out why they were better.

One of the running gags Des wrote was to have George Lazenby in almost every panel but being ignored by the other Bonds and unable to say anything. Funny stuff.

“Skyfall” got about two and a half pages, while “Casino Royale” and “Quantum of Solace” only got a couple of panels each, but we only got five pages to begin with, so none of these movies got a proper work over.

That’s it for another miserable Monday’s MADness! Toon in next week to witness me take another baby step towards doing a real cover of MAD!