MADness 85: The Lost Hobbit Spoof!

It’s Monday! Time for another moronic look back at my work for MAD! This episode features a lost Hobbit movie parody… Well not really lost but not published in an actual issue of MAD either. While MAD did parodies of all three of “The Hobbit” films only two ended up in the magazine. The third was done as an original piece for a special “Loot Crate” edition of MAD. Written by Desmond Devlin, only Loot Crate subscribers (and collectors on eBay) got a copy of this 6 page spoof.

Loot Crate, if you are not familiar, is a grab bag (okay… grab BOX) program where you receive a box full of stuff every month for a subscription fee. It’s geared towards geeks and gamers, and each month the box has a “theme”. May 2015’s theme was “Unite”, and included in the box was a special edition of MAD exclusive to Loot Crate.

The issue was smaller than a normal issue of MAD, both page-wise and dimensions (6.75 x 8.5 inches). It was mostly reprinted material that fit the theme but this parody “The Hobbit- The Battle of Five Armies” was new, as was “A MAD Look at Superheroes Uniting” by Sergio Aragonés. This spoof was reprinted in a MAD bookazine called “MAD Spoofs Sci-Fi and Fantasy” in Aug 2018.

The thing I remember the most about this job was the two page “battle scene” spread on pages 4-5. I’ve done more than a few two page spreads for MAD that were insanely packed with imagery, but this one toped them all. Des sent a list of about 50 potential gag cameos, and I think I worked them all in:

That splash was also a rare instance where I got to play around with the balloon placement, where the inset panels went, etc. The two insets at the bottom right needed to be at the bottoms right because then ended the scene and led into the next page, but otherwise I had a lot of freedom to compose this page.

That’s it for another middling parody of Middle-Earth! Toon in next week for our very off target parody of “American Sniper”!