Tom's Mad Blog
January 13th, 2014 | Posted in Monday MADness
Back in 2001, much to the chagrin of many long-time fans, MAD began running advertisements in the magazine. Economic realities had to be faced, and the MAD team felt the magazine needed to be updated to color and better paper if they were to interest young readers. They needed revenues to do that and ads were the simplest solution. The concerns people had that MAD‘s ability to be impartial in it’s skewering of corporate America were proven to be unfounded… they went on doing what they’d always done with the same gleeful zeal no matter who was paying to put an ad in the magazine.… READ MORE
January 12th, 2014 | Posted in General
Q: You write in your book and on your blog how important it is that everything in an illustration has the same style, look, and feel, for instance background people. How do you make something part of your universe, when you’ve never drawn it before? For instance a camel or a horse (like on the splash page of The Hunger Pains)? Do you need a lot of extra sketches or can you just draw everything right away with the help of some photo references? A: That’s a good question, I hadn’t ever really thought about it before. First off, the oft-given advice referred to above… READ MORE
January 10th, 2014 | Posted in General
Clicky to Embiggen… The MAD show on Cartoon Network aired their 100th episode in November, and to commemorate the event the show’s creator Kevin Shinick commissioned me to do a MAD Magazine style splash page in the “A MAD Peek Behind the Scenes of…” tradition featuring the show’s creative team. Everybody got a print of it for Christmas, and Kevin got the original inked art. Kevin wrote the jokes and gave me information on each of the folks in the scene to work with. This was a challenging project, because I had to to the layouts, header graphics and text and box placement as well… READ MORE
January 9th, 2014 | Posted in News
The National Cartoonists Society is starting it’s annual call for entries for consideration for their NCS Divisional Awards recognizing excellence in professional cartooning. As always, you DO NOT have to be a member of the NCS to have your work considered for a divisional award… all that is required is that the work be eligible as detailed below. Below you will find a list of the juries which will judge the categories, the jury chair and the address to which you will send your entry. As always, NO EMAIL SUBMISSIONS WILL BE ACCEPTED, with the exception of the Online Comics divisions, which allows emailed PDF… READ MORE
January 8th, 2014 | Posted in Sketch O'The Week
This week’s sketch is for my youngest daughter, The Effervescent Gabrielle, who loves this commercial. READ MORE
January 7th, 2014 | Posted in It's All Geek to Me!
It’s All Geek to Me Dept. It’s been a long time since I did one of these types of posts, but as I am a gadget junkie yesterday’s Pebble watch news was of interest. The good news? Pebble introduced a new design, called the Pebble Steel. It’s made of… wait for it… stainless steel (regular or black matte). It also has slightly different button spacing and profile, a reconfigured charging port, is waterproof to 5 atms, significantly less border space around the face, and comes with both a matching steel band and a leather band. The bad news? It’s $250. I get a lot of… READ MORE
January 6th, 2014 | Posted in Monday MADness
In honor of the end of the football season…well, as a Green Bay Packer fan it’s over for me anyway…here’s a real blast from the past. The following are spot illustrations I did for MAD‘s long-defunct weekly original web feature “MADness of the Week“. This one was from an article on Fantasy Football, circa 2000. The text from the piece is long gone, but the gags are pretty self evident: READ MORE
January 5th, 2014 | Posted in Mailbag
Q: When you are putting together panels for a tv or movie spoof, do you cement the basics first and add the “chicken fat” in the background later, or do you do everything at once? Do the background gags come to you on the spot? A: Certainly I am concerned with the basic layouts, storytelling, caricatures and the scripted gags first, and the “chicken fat” comes second. For those who don’t know what the term “chicken fat” refers to, it was coined by MAD great Will Elder and meant all the background gags he crammed into his panels. From my post after Elder’s passing away:… READ MORE
