MADness #88- Age of Ultron!

Welcome to another Monday. It’s bad enough that it’s the start of another miserable work week, but you also have to be subjected to another episode of our look back at my work for MAD magazine AND on top of that it’s yet another spoof of a Marvel movie! However, as we are nearing the end of the line, we have this consolation… this is the last full and actual parody of a Marvel film MAD ever did. This was written by my partner in CLAPTRAP crime Desmond Devlin, and first appeared in MAD #535, Oct 2015.

What’s that you say? This was not the last Marvel movie spoofed in MAD? They did a parody of “The Avengers: Endgame” in MAD #7 (2019, not 1953)? Not really, that was one of those “we didn’t see the movie but here’s a feature trying to take advantage of a film just now in theaters” things. You have to have seen the film to do a real spoof of it. Back in the early 2000s they tried to do some movie parodies in advance of the film release by relying on leaked scripts and plots based on books (Harry Potter in particular), but I never considered those real movie parodies either. Anyway, that Avengers piece in #7 doesn’t count. This was MAD‘s final parody of a Marvel film.

Not much backstory to this one. It was kind of a run-of-the-mill sort of assignment. I was getting pretty bored with the Marvel films at this point, and indifference is the enemy of creativity. If I really love or really hate a film or TV show I am much more interested and invested in the art. It was hard to get “into” this one very deep. You can usually tell that was the case (at least with my work) when there are less visual gags and “Chicken Fat” in a piece than I typically add.

I do remember adding that “At least we’re not Greece” graffiti on the bridge in the page above because at the time Greece was in the midst of a serious economic collapse and debt crisis that was all over the news. The gag being that it was preferable to have your country ripped out of the earth and dropped to smash to rubble than have the economy blow up.

Of course no one knew this was the last of the Marvel film spoofs in MAD. We were all blissfully unaware of the impending move to Burbank at the end of 2017 and the dissolution of the New York MAD staff, followed in 2019 with the end of new material and MAD becoming the (mostly) reprint publication it is today.

But NOT YET! I still have thirty more consecutive issues I had work in before the curtain got drawn on my MAD run, and after that a handful of covers and other interior pieces. This trek through my MAD work still has some road to run. Toon in next week for a piece making fun of a TV genre that all MAD readers are intimately familiar with… The Home and Garden Network??