In the early days of my career, I followed the MAD model when referencing other media: dressing them up in goofy little pun-names and making them about 20-70% sillier. This clip from the first arc in Fans shows that practice.
Star Trek is Star Tec (or StarTec), Lost in Space is Last in Place, Doctor Who is Doctor Why?. The full image contains Samson for Hercules, The XYZ-Files for The X-Files, Zena: Battle Barmaid for Xena: Warrior Princess, and the just-barely-altered Star Warz. Some of those names were mine; others were artist Jason Waltrip following my lead.
Before long, though, I started to pull away from these cheeky alterations. Fans was a series about pop-culture fandom, among other things, so I wanted to drop in pop-culture references as efficiently as possible.
Say a character who’s usually poised enters the room with a new pair of glasses and an awkward attitude. Their friend can say, “Why are you Clark Kenting all of a sudden?” As dialogue, that works well enough. But following MAD Magazine rules, we’d have to change this line to “Why are you Clark Kan’ting all of a sudden?”
That extra modification, that MAD mod, just kills the humor, the verisimilitude, the everything. Instead of living with these characters in their plugged-into-pop-culture world, the reader is reminded that they’re reading a made-up story. And the writer looks too risk-averse to say what they mean.
The courage to risk legal attention was on my mind some years later, when Disney acquired Marvel. I’d seen lots of my fellow comics creatives selling their drawings of Spider-Man or Wolverine, and some were now offering drawings of Mickey as Captain America. So I decided to commission another art piece for sale, the kind of self-celebratory crowd scene both Disney and Marvel had long practiced:
John Waltrip (Jason’s brother and another longtime collaborator) relished the chance to draw all these characters, most for the first time. I came up with nearly all the interactions, though: speedsters Quicksilver and Dash racing, Monsters Inc. trying to recruit the Hulk, Doctor Doom’s flags over the Magic Kingdom’s castle. Squirrel Girl befriending Chip and Dale (they’re chipmunks, it’s close enough). The duet between Dazzler and Hannah Montana, serenading Belle and Marvel’s Beast. (They would’ve been a better match, back when Marvel’s Beast was a merry intellectual.)
And front and center, Mickey and Spidey attempting a handshake while Scrooge McDuck is enraptured by all the sweet, sweet cashola that handshake represents.
Scrooge is as close as this illustration gets to real satire: most of it isn’t really about corporate critique. Its goal is just to have a little fun.
For a while, such fun was in high demand, and I met that demand…even as some of my friends urged me to watch my back. “I don’t think this deal made Disney’s legal department smaller,” as one of them put it.
But the cease-and-desist letter never arrived. Maybe Disney legal foresaw that time would take care of it. For all the inventiveness in the drawing, it was only internet-famous for a couple weeks, and demand dropped off as soon as “Disney owns Marvel” stopped being new enough information to sound weird. A sequel project (“Epic Warner,” featuring DC Comics and other Warner properties) didn’t make any kind of splash, and the Waltrips and I moved on.
But I sure am glad we didn’t spend any time “copyright-proofing” our work by turning Mickey’s ears into squares or whatever. Sometimes you need to take those kinds of risks, even if fun is the only goal. Sometimes fun is important.