MADness #91: Hunger Games: Mockingjay!

I know what you are thinking… Tom forgot about his “Monday MADness” post this week, and you are doubtless rejoicing that you are not to be subjected to yet another look back in the archives of my work for MAD Magazine. Well, I didn’t and you are! Time and family circumstances just delayed our usual MAD flashback foolishness. This week we are back to the stuff I did for the actual magazine with yet another Hunger Games movie spoof. This time my CLAPTRAP cohort Desmond Devlin and I spoof BOTH Parts 1 and 2 of “The Hunger Games: Mockingjay” in one fell swoop… mostly because there isn’t enough plot for one movie parody in both films put together anyway. This dreary dystopian dud first appeared in MAD #538, April 2016.

Right at the time I was working on this piece I was featured on a PBS show called “MN Original”, which did short stories about different creative people from Minnesota. I happened to be working on the opening page you see above when they showed up to film me in the studio, so you can actually watch me doing some inking on this page in the clip here.

This was also one of the rare instances where a movie parody started not with the big two page opening spread but with an “intro” page, which then lead into the showcase two page scene. Des did the same format about a year earlier when we did “Orange is the New Black” in MAD #530. Here’s the two pager that followed:

This one was eight pages! That was a lot for MAD, which usually maxed out at six pages or seven tops. Little did I know the next parody I’d do for them would be nine pages followed by another eight pager! Whew.

I was not a fan of doing the art for these Hunger Games spoofs because I hated drawing Jennifer Lawrence. I was never satisfied with my likenesses because she seemed to look different depending on the angle of the photo of her. It wasn’t until this spoof that I figured out it was her cheekbones that were throwing me off. They are not only big but so extremely round they look like cheeks in some instances, which gives her a chubby sort of look at certain angles. I did better in this one that the previous two movie spoofs, in my opinion.

One other thing I remember about doing this spoof was that I had one of those rare moments when the MAD editorial staff took exception to one of my visual gags, and made me change the final art. Here are the pencils for the next two pages I turned in to MAD for review along with the rest of the art:

I don’t recall any changes being asked for at the pencil stage. After 16 years of working with the MAD staff there seldom were any changes needed, and any asked for were mostly tweaks like making sure I emphasize something in the final. However while I was doing the inks for page 6 (left page above) I thought there was a lot of dead space on the right side of that final wide panel at the bottom. I thought I’d fill it with some kind of cameo gag. In this scene, our heroes are crossing this huge deserted courtyard when this black gooey oil-like liquid starts bursting out of the ground and they have to run for it or get engulfed. Here was the cameo I decided to add to that panel:

Black oil bubbling up out of the ground? Hello Uncle Jed! I thought that was a good pop culture gag reference. Where I made my mistake was that I did not check with the MAD guys first about adding the gag. They got back to me and said they didn’t think so specific a moment in an old TV show like “The Beverley Hillbillies” would be remembered by enough readers for the gag to make sense. They told me to replace Jed Clampett with this:

The BP sign references the 2010 “Deepwater Horizon”:” oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico. Personally I thought that was the exact same gag as the “Exxon Valdez” life preserver I had already added on the far left of that panel, and that the Jed Clampett “bubbling oil” reference from the show opening was funnier, even if some people would not “get” it. However I did not love it enough to go to bat for it, so the BP gag is what appears in the issue.

I thought the Ed Norton gag in panel one of the next page (that was Des’s gag) was just as obscure as my Jed Clampett gag. How many readers would remember Art Carney‘s character Ed was a sewer worker? Not a big deal, but I thought it was kind of strange they’d feel strongly enough about it to make me alter final art.

That’s it for another week! We are slowly closing in on the end for the New York era of MAD…. only twelves issue left! Of course none of us knew that at the time. Toon in next week for yet another superhero movie parody, another eight page feature, and the fastest turnaround time I ever had for a multiple page job for MAD.