Monday MADness Bonus- MAD #31 Cover!

We’ll take a short break from looking back at the work I did for MAD years ago to something new! MAD #31 comes out this week, and I did the cover for the issue. It’s been leaked online in various Facebook groups, so I guess I can share it online now.

She didn’t take credit for it but MAD head honcho Suzy Hutchinson wrote this cover gag, and it’s a pretty good one. I always prefer “Alfred doing something” cover gags to “Alfred substitution” gags. It’s easy and lazy to just replace some actor in character with Alfred, and then make the other characters from whatever source material they come from looking aghast or grossed out that Alfred is among them. Those kinds of cover can be clever is they include some sideways gag where Alfred is doing something Alfred-like as the character, and not just standing there, a cover gag like this one for #31 is more fun IMO.

This cover went through a number of revisions. It started out where the doctors in the background were just going to be ones from the spoofs and features reprinted inside the issue:

Dave Berg’s doctor from “The Lighter Side of…” joined docs from E.R., Scrubs and Grey’s Anatomy as the group getting mooned my a clueless Alfred. Then the E.R. parody got cut from the list of content, and it was decided to do some cameos by other pop culture doctors instead:

So we added Dr. Zoidberg from Futurama, Dr. McCoy from Star Trek and The Doctor from Doctor Who (I picked Tom Baker, just for the iconic nature of his version).

Then it was decided Tom Baker was too old school, and they wanted him replaced with… Dr. Dre???

I’m still scratching my head over that one. I would think Baker’s Doctor would be much more recognizable and suit the gag better than Dr. Dre… but I’m just the guy who does the art. I was also asked to “clutter up” the environment with some other hospital/doctor sight gags.

This is my sixth cover for the actual magazine, which makes me one of only 17 artists with six or more covers according to Mike Slaubaugh’s MAD Lists (not updated with this issue yet as of this posting).