Tom's Mad Blog
June 3rd, 2014 | Posted in General
Forgive me as I digress a little about working out. Back to art on Wednesday. Last week while wasting time on Facebook I ran across a link to this post about the evils of cross-fit training. In the article, the author derides cross-fit training as being unsafe, unhealthy, leaving you wide open to injury, and being in general a very bad idea. The Facebook post was followed by a lot of people agreeing and saying things like “why would I want to fail everyday?”, “I ripped my arm out of the socket doing cross-fit!”, and the ever popular “cross-fit sucks!!!”. For those of you who… READ MORE
June 2nd, 2014 | Posted in Monday MADness
After the release this weekend of Angelina Jolie‘s new movie “Malificent”, I thought for this week’s Monday MADnessI’d post a look at the art from another film where she had to wear prosthetics… but not horns. Here’s “Lotta Crotch: Bazoom Raider” from MAD #410, October 2001, written by Desmond Devlin. Clicky any to embiggen… READ MORE
June 1st, 2014 | Posted in Mailbag
Q: Hi Tom – I’ve been struggling with the following for over a year now, possibly without realizing it! But I now see we have 2 (or maybe 3 options!) when it comes to creating a caricature. 1. We can keep the head shape as an accurate representation with little or no exaggeration – after all, we are engaged in the quest for likeness (so this is the most important thing – when we see someone from a distance, we recognize them, without seeing their features in detail). We can THEN exaggerate the features – make the eyes smaller, the nose more bulbous, the ears… READ MORE
May 30th, 2014 | Posted in General
Official Reuben Weekend Art by Ed Steckley This past weekend the National Cartoonists Society, an august organization I am privileged to be current President of, had its annual Reuben Awards Weekend in not-so-sunny San Diego, CA… well, we did see some sun on the final day of the festivities, but for most of it we experienced what native San Diegans call “May Gray”. That hardly got us down, however. The weekend was a lot of fun. They usually are, but this one seemed to be turned up a notch. Most of the events took place at the beautiful Omni hotel right at the start of… READ MORE
May 29th, 2014 | Posted in General
I know I promised a Reubens wrap-up today but I am swamped trying to catch up with freelance work I have put aside for the last week or two. Tomorrow, I promise. READ MORE
May 28th, 2014 | Posted in Sketch O'The Week
This week’s sketch is “Game of Thrones”‘s Nikolaj Coster-Waldau aka Jaime Lannister. READ MORE
May 27th, 2014 | Posted in General
Getting back home later tonight from San Diego and the National Cartoonists Society’s Reuben Award Weekend! Full wrap up coming Thursday. Too tired for anything else… plus my liver hurts. READ MORE
May 26th, 2014 | Posted in General
This week’s Monday MADness is a look at a piece I did for MAD Kids, the short-lived pre-teen version of MAD. The first of the Sam Raimi “Spider-Man” movies had just come out, and these large spot illustrations were called “Wall Webbers”. In the magazine, these were two page spreads containing two main images (and some accessories). The art department at MAD added dotted lines around them so they could be easily cut out, and indicated where a piece of yarn was supposed to be inserted. Then they could be taped to a wall and the yarn stretched from Spidey to the other image to… READ MORE
