Tom's Mad Blog
September 29th, 2021 | Posted in Sketch O'The Week
Still under the gun with deadlines this week, so no time for a new sketch today. Instead, here’s a look at an inked version of a sketch of Jackie Gleeson from a month or so ago. Someone commissioned it after missing out on the sketch. I’ve been doing a lot of inking this week, so I working it up in between waiting for wet pages to dry. This is mostly crow quill pen and ink, with some #2 brushwork as well. READ MORE
September 28th, 2021 | Posted in News
In a little over two weeks the National Cartoonists Society will conduct NCSFest 2021, once again taking place virtually on their website NCSFEST.com. This year will be another collaboration with The Lakes International Comic Arts Festival, which is going on simultaneously on the other side of the pond in Kendall, UK. There will be a lot of fun programming, with panels and presentations galore… some featuring yours truly. The NCS Reuben awards are intertwined into the festival, so those honors will be bestowed including THE Reuben Award for “Outstanding Cartoonist of the Year”. So, mark your calendars but don’t worry about wearing any formalwear… or… READ MORE
September 27th, 2021 | Posted in MAD Magazine
It’s time for another pitstop on the pot-hole riddled road that is my work for MAD Magazine. This spoof of MTV’s “Pimp My Ride” was my 13th TV show parody for MAD. It was also my second collaboration with MAD editor Dave Croatto as writer… and my last with Dave. I guess he thought enough was enough. This feature appeared in MAD #456, Aug 2005. This is unusual but I have scans of the final pencils of this job as opposed to the “roughs” I usually save. Ordinarily I would do rough sketches of the pages on drawing paper or later digital done at print… READ MORE
September 26th, 2021 | Posted in Mailbag
Q: What are your thoughts on The Walt Disney Company’s barrage of lawsuits on Friday? A: Here’s a link to another story about this issue. For those tl;dr folks here’s the brief version: Earlier this year the heirs/estates of several artists and writers who created Marvel characters like Spider-Man, Thor, etc. filed lawsuits against Disney (owners of Marvel) claiming copyrights to the characters should revert back to them after a 60 year time limit under the Copyright Revision Act of 1976. Disney recently filed countersuits saying the characters were created under a “work for hire” arrangement, and therefore the copyright claims are invalid. My thoughts?… READ MORE
September 24th, 2021 | Posted in General
Things are getting hairy in the studio. We might be seeing this ugly mug a bit in the next week or two. READ MORE
September 23rd, 2021 | Posted in Illustration Throwback Thursday
Back in the early 2000’s I did a lot of work for Scholastic, mostly spot illustrations for their various publications, and occasionally covers. This was the cover of one of their school magazines I did in late 2007, and the story was about how online social sites were going to be a a new major part of political candidate’s campaigns in 2008. Little did we know. Gotta love the “MySpace” appearance. In 2007 it was the biggest social media platform in the world, and Facebook was a just started minor player. Again, little did we know. READ MORE
September 22nd, 2021 | Posted in Sketch O'The Week
I ran across this sketch in an old but barely used sketchbook I started using again… Aaron Paul from “Breaking Bad”. I think I posted it back in 2012 but for some reason many of the posts I did in 2012 have corrupted image files that don’t appear… so here it is again! It’s a little smaller than most of my SotWs, so it’s at a bargain price in the Studio Store. READ MORE
September 21st, 2021 | Posted in News
In just a couple of weeks I’ll be at New York Comic Con, which will mark the first major comic con I’ve appeared at since C2E2 back in Feb of 2020, when the world was so naive and COVID-19 was something we’d just started hearing rumbles about. Well, in celebration of being back at in-person cons, I’m releasing a new book Sketch o’the Week, Vol 4! Like the previous three volumes, this one is chock full of sketches and other works from the last 16 months or so (100 caricatures, in fact). I’m placing it in the Studio Store for preordering if anyone is interested.… READ MORE
