Mad Magazine #518: Trademark Graffiti (Dec, 2012)

One of the toughest gigs I illustrated for MAD but one I was pretty happy with when all was said and done. The reason it was tougher than most of the assignments was that I had to find all the corporate logos, print them out and trace them into the body of the illustrations. Then I tried to work in different style of handwriting for as many of the graffiti elements as possible so they didn't look like one person did them all. And then came all the elements I don't usually tend to draw -- appliances, trucks, characters from a TV series and the like. As always, the fun was in adding the extra details to the script (here written by Desmond Devlin). There's a lot of extra gags in the panels that I put in to keep things fun and honor the spirit of old MAD, from an Al Jaffee "bone in the vomit" bit and of course the Will Elder "chicken fat", which influenced me as a kid and still influences me to this day. If the jokes aren't always all that funny, add some extra bits of business to keep the reader's eyes on the image a few moments more. if the joke is funny, the extras are cherries on top.

In the panel with the truck and the pelicans, I tried to go hard on portraying the dead birds , making it as grotesque as I could. I thought I might get a note to pull back a bit, but it was okayed and went through as inked. I thought it needed to be a bit nasty and not funny at all.

We almost never got notes on our MAD jobs, which I was really pleased about. I remember once talking to Kyle Baker -- at the time he was freelancing for the magazine and this was before I started doing work for them -- and he told me he stopped working there because they gave him so many notes to redraw things. So when I was given my first MAD art gigs I expected to get lots of notes, but I can't even think of anything that stands out as far as losing a joke or a detail goes in the decade I freelanced there. Sometimes they'd ask to make something goofier or bigger to emphasize a detail or gag, but I never experienced any serious editorial notes that I can remember in my MAD days.

It was such a fun job. I probably say that in every MAD-related post. That and Nickelodeon Magazine, both really missed. I couldn't believe this was from 2012, it didn't seem all that long ago.

Back to the article at hand (MAD called these pieces "articles", I never really got used to the term). Sarah did a terrific job on the colors and in making some of the graffiti look more textured or in color without black lines around the lettering. It's one of our best art contributions, I think we did some really good cartooning here for the readers. Lots to see, notice, hopefully smile at. I still remember drawing that bizarre lobster. I spent way too much time on the extra details in these, but it made me happy to make them more fun.

I found this graphic online accidentally while looking for something else I worked on. I think it contracts all three pages of images. I don't have access to the files, I think they're on the "bad" hard drive that, hopefully, will one day be dealt with.