MADness #99- The Wall!

Here we go with another nauseating step on the chronological crawl through my work for MAD Magazine. This was the 99th issue my work appeared in, and fittingly enough this piece, a spoof the the prime time TV game show “The Wall”, was written by the same guy who wrote the very first piece I ever had printed in MAD… MAD‘s MADdest writer Dick DeBartolo! This first appeared in MAD #546, Aug 2017.

This also ended up being the last time I did the art on a Dick De feature. Of all the writers I worked with at MAD, Desmond Devlin was far and away the one I got paired with most often. I did the art on 47 of Des’s scripts? Dick was next with 22. I did the art for nine movie parodies and eleven TV show parodies that Dick wrote, plus two other pieces. It was always a pleasure drawing anything Dick wrote.

This job was kind of unique in that I did a hald traditional half digital job on it. The “Wall” set piece was this gigantic grid that was much easier to construct digitally that it would have been to draw it over and over, so I did the wall and most of the backgrounds entirely digitally, and only the human characters and props they interact with were done the old fashioned way.

I also can’t quite remember where I got the two contestant’s faces from. They aren’t anyone I know, but I seem to remember them being faces I found in a modeling headshot book. I would have only had the basic headshot of them so I really just used those pictures as a starting point, and then turned them into cartoony characters.

As far as working with Dick DeBartolo in MAD again sometime, never say never. Dick is still working and who knows? Maybe DC will decide to do some special issue of MAD with new content in it again and I’ll get to work on something he wrote. I’d like that.

Well, that’s it for yet another episode! toon in next week for my 100th issue appearance (big deal).