MADness #93: Batman v Superman!

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Time for another moronic Monday look back at my work for MAD magazine! This week we revisit one of the toughest jobs MAD ever dropped on me, and how it upset even The Lovely Anna! I’m talking about MAD‘s parody of “Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice”, written by my CLAPTRAP cohort Desmond Devlin and first appearing in MAD #540, August 2016.

I often get asked how long I was given to do the art on these movie and TV parodies. Since the art is the last step of the entire process we artists usually are up against the print deadline, but that doesn’t always mean it’s a short deadline. These parodies can be in the works several issues before they are supposed to see print, and I have had as long as 6 weeks to do the art. Of course, being a freelancer I always turn the job it at the deadline no matter how much time they give me, so the real answer to the question “how long does it take” is “as long as they give me”.

This job was by far the tightest deadline with the most amount of work needed MAD ever gave me for a regular issue assignment. I do not recall what the reason was for the really short deadline, but around the 1st of May (2016) they sent me Des’s script, layouts for an EIGHT PAGE spoof, and I had 10 days to do it. EIGHT PAGES. TEN DAYS.

It varies but I would ordinarily say  it takes me three days to do a page. That includes whatever research I need to do, the pencils including coming up with visual gags, the inks, and then the color. That’s working full time on it but not pulling all-nighters or 18 hour days. I’ll do the math for you. That’s 24 days to do eight pages. Now if I drop everything else and do really long days, I can cut that down to 2 days per page. But that’s a lot of 18-20 hour days, and probably an all-nighter or two in there. That’s still 16 days. In order to do this in 10 days, I had to stop everything else going on in my life, work almost literally around the clock, and quite frankly cut a lot of corners with the work itself. None of that makes Anna very happy, but it was the part about having to “stop everything else going on in my life” that was the big problem she had on this particular job.

The Lovely Anna is a long suffering woman with a lot of patience. She’s put up with many tight deadlines and ridiculous hours I put in on jobs. This one almost broke her. You see, right in the middle of this 10 day deadline happened to be my 50th birthday, and I made her cancel the party she had put together for it.

She. Was. Not. Pleased.

In fact I had to restrain her from calling the MAD offices to give them a piece of her mind. I told MAD art director Sam Viviano to steer clear of her should she answer the phone when he called, explaining about the 50th birthday party thing.

Right after I finished the job was the National Cartoonists Society Reuben Awards weekend, that year happening in Memphis. Anna knew Sam was going to be there so I was a little worried she would lay into him when she saw him. However I underestimated how sly Sam and the MAD guys were. Upon checking into the hotel and going up to our room, we found a beautiful bouquet of flowers and a card from the MAD staff apologizing for the impossible deadline and the cancelled party. MAD VP of Editorial John Ficarra also made sure I knew how much he and the staff appreciated my efforts on that job. Anna got over it. I still turned 50.

The really tough part for me was I felt the work I did on this was very much compromised by the lack of time. It’s very apparent to me that I slapped this out in record time, and so much of it needed to be better thought out and executed. Very far from my best work. I did manage to pay a little homage to “The Dark Knight Returns” in the Batman/Superman fight, but there isn’t much “chicken fat” in this, the caricature likenesses are not very sharp, and the inks and coloring are hurried and rough. It was the best I could do in the time given. I think I spent my “normal” amount of time only on the splash page, and then banged out the other 6 pages. Looking back at this now I realize how nice it was to work on CLAPTRAP, even if it took forever to get finished.

That’s it for another episode of Tom’s Monday MADness! Only ten issues left of the New York City based MAD. Then it’s off to sunny Burbank and MAD 2.0.