Monday MADness- Big Bang Theory!

Back in MAD #503 (May 2010) I did the art on a Desmond Devlin authored parody of the TV Show “The Big Bang Theory”… finished splash page above. As you can see, the splash was somewhat atypical of your usual MAD parody opening. Des had the article narrated by Albert Einstein, and the opening spread called for the traditional introductory caricatures of the cast to look like they’d been drawn on a blackboard by Einstein. I was not sure how I’d be able to make the caricatures look good by drawing them in white chalk lines. They would look like photo negatives… unless I used the white as the light not the linework and did more of a chalk “painting of them. That is how I pitched it initially:

Here’s a closer look at this style of “chalk” drawing:

The editors decided that Einstein wouldn’t be able to do something like that (nor, I think, did they think it looked like it was done in chalk), and they should be simple chalk line drawings. Thus, we went with this instead:

Actually as you cab see in the finished spread at the top of this post, I simplified the drawings even more in the final. Here’s the rest of the pages:

Incidentally, as show creator Chuck Lorre is a huge fan of MAD, he owns the original art of this splash, while I own an oversized print of the art with signatures from the entire cast. It hangs in my studio.