Tom's Mad Blog
December 9th, 2013 | Posted in MAD Magazine
On news stands everywhere on Dec. 17th, in comic book shops this week, in some lucky subscriber’s mailboxes already and available digitally immediately via the MAD iPad app: MAD # 525 (February 2014) Cover (Mark Fredrickson) The Fundalini Pages (Jeff Kruse, Aton Emdin, Rick Tulka, Bob Eckstein, Matt Lassen, Justin Peterson, Kevin Pope, Teresa Burns Parkhurst, Desmond Devlin, Tom Bunk, Bob Staake, Steven Weissman, Stan Sinberg, John Kerschbaum) The Swallowing (Arnie Kogen, Tom Richmond) Spy vs Spy (Peter Kuper) Planet Tad!!!!! (Writer: Tim Carvell) The MAD 20- The Dumbest People, Events, and Things of 2013 The Dysfunctional U.S. Congress (Jay Rath, Tom Richmond) The Boston… READ MORE
December 8th, 2013 | Posted in Mailbag
Q: What your experiences in mailing original artwork… you know good ol’ snail mail.¬¨‚Ć Any carriers to avoid? Any horror stories? Advice? A: I’m pretty paranoid about mailing originals, so I have had very few issues with doing so. The most important thing is how you package it. Basically, you have to box it up anticipating it will be dropped, thrown, stepped on and otherwise carelessly treated from the beginning to end of the journey. If you package it securely enough that none of those things will damage the artwork, you will be alright. I used to (briefly) work in a UPS warehouse, so I… READ MORE
December 7th, 2013 | Posted in MAD Magazine
Visit PopMatters.com for the sneak peek It’s another exclusive look into MAD‘s “20 Dumbest People, Events and Things of 2013”, this one courtesy of Popmatters.com! Visit their website for a closer look at Dumb Thing #15: Obama’s backpedaling after his tough talk on if Syria starting trotting out chemical weapons, which of course they did. Also on the post is a long, thoughtful, and intelligently written post about the poignancy and cleverness of this parody of the film “Silver Linings Playbook”… which entirely misses the fact that this is not a parody of that movie at all but a political commentary that used the movie’s… READ MORE
December 6th, 2013 | Posted in General
Shipping times get hairy as the holiday approaches… if you are thinking about getting something from the Studio Store in time to wrap up for a Christmas present, now’s the time! I have only 15 Limited Artist Editions of my book left! Have a caricature of you or the person of your choice drawn by me inside a copy of The Mad Art of Caricature!, complete with a hand-numbered bookplate. Only 120 of these limited editions will ever be made, and 105 of them are gone. I’m down to my last 44 Doctor Who “The Doctor is In” limited edition prints. Get one for that… READ MORE
December 6th, 2013 | Posted in General
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uEdRLlqdgA4[/youtube] This has been all over the internet the last few days. Artist Kyle Lambert did this digital painting of Morgan Freeman using ProCreate and an iPad… and his finger.¬¨‚ĆAccording to the video, it took over 285,000 brush strokes and 200 hours of work. This has elicited a lot of discussion and speculation on the internet about, among other things, the following: 1. Did he just trace a photo? My two cents: Yes, he must have used a photo as an underlayer even though it is not seen in the video (easy to exclude from a screen capture video). No way could anyone do something… READ MORE
December 5th, 2013 | Posted in General
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xDUKzdidzQo[/youtube] This is a great video interview with syndicated comic strip “Baby Blues” creators Rick Kirkman and Jerry Scott about the genesis of the strip. I’m fortunate to be able to call Rick a good friend. We have been on many USO tours together to places like Germany, Kuwait, Iraq, Afghanistan, and even drew together on the U.S.S. Enterprise in the middle of the Arabian Gulf. He’s an incredible talent… incidentally he was honored with the NCS Reuben Award for “Outstanding Cartoonist of the Year” last May. A well deserved honor. Baby Blues has a special place in me and The Lovely Anna’s hearts. It… READ MORE
December 4th, 2013 | Posted in Sketch O'The Week
Clicky to Embiggen… As promised, here’s the pencil sketch for the splash page of MAD‘s “The Swallowing”, a parody of “The Following” TV show. I’ve taken to doing my roughs digitally these days as it seems to go a bit faster and I am free to move elements about and resize them on-the-fly. Plus I don’t think as much about the quality of the pencil line and am therefore a bit looser with the work, leading to drawing more with the inks. MAD #525 will be on news stands December 17th. READ MORE
December 4th, 2013 | Posted in MAD Magazine
Clicky to go to Zap2it for a closer look… Zap2it.com just posted a sneak peek to the splash of MAD‘s parody of the TV series “The Following”, words by Arnie Kogen, art by me. They have close ups of the four quarters of the splash so you can read Arnie’s gags, so visit their post for a better look. Amazingly they were able to write several paragraphs about the parody without once mentioning me or Arnie as the creative team! 🙁 I’ll post the pencil roughs for this as my “sketch o’the week” a little later today. READ MORE
