Tom's Mad Blog
October 19th, 2010 | Posted in Freelancing
One of the things that director Ray Griggs wanted me to do for the animation segments in his movie “I Want Your Money” was to add in some MAD style background gags. One of the gags was making fun of the fact that Obama has a pop culture celebrity image like that of no other president and is perceived as playing up to it. Thus I had some fun putting his face or head on recognizable pieces of famous art or awards. You can spot a couple of them in this picture, including CG versions of some of the ideas I suggested in that vein… READ MORE
October 18th, 2010 | Posted in General
What the ?!? Yes, this time I’m off to Orlando and the House of Mouse with the family for a little vacation. I know I promised a report on last weekend’s Festival of Cartoon Art at OSU in Columbus, OH, but as I was forced to leave a day early due to a couple of emergency jobs coming in I could not pass up, I barely got to experience any of it. In fact, I only got to hear the presentations of Paul Levitz, James Sturm and Dan Piraro and hang out with some cartoonists pals for two nights, so I will leave the reporting… READ MORE
October 17th, 2010 | Posted in Mailbag
Q: I Really love your work, especially the detail you put in. Your pictures are never taken in at a glance – there is something interesting going on right into the corners. So I have a question about your attention to detail. Obviously it’s important for caricatures that the details are as accurate a depiction as necessary to make the image recognizable, but how important is it to you that the details of the less essential elements in a scene are similarly as accurate? If you draw a car in the background do you like the car to be recognizably a Toyota or a Ford… READ MORE
October 15th, 2010 | Posted in News
Today is “opening day” for the movie “I Want Your Money“, a conservative film by filmmaker Ray Griggs for which I did a bunch of artwork including the caricature of Obama for the above movie poster, character designs for the animated sequences as well as storyboard for those segments. This movie is getting quite a bit of press. The Lovely Anna called me this morning (I’m in Ohio for the OSU Festival of Cartoon Art”) to say there was a feature about the film on the Today Show this morning that was mostly clips of the animation using my character designs. I’ve also gotten a… READ MORE
October 15th, 2010 | Posted in General
I’m currently in Columbus, OH for the Festival of Cartoon Art, a once-every-three-years celebration of the art of cartooning held at Ohio State University and the Billy Ireland Cartoon Library. You can read all about the event in this post. Should be a great time with plenty of terrific panels and speakers. Full report next week… READ MORE
October 14th, 2010 | Posted in MAD Magazine
As promised, here’s a look at a bit of the art for the parody of “Glee” in the just-released MAD #506: Click for a closer look… My kids are big Glee fans so they ended up in the splash page (Gabrielle and Tom in upper left on stair landing, college girl Victoria to right of “Sue Sylvester” with her boyfriend Pat). Oldest girl Elizabeth doesn’t like Glee but if I ever do a “Roseanne” parody she’s in. I had a lot of fun with this one. READ MORE
October 13th, 2010 | Posted in Sketch O'The Week
I’ve got a section of my website entitled the Me Gallery chock full of caricatures of me from artists all over the world. If you are interested n the funny(ish) story of how the Me Gallery began, you can read about that here. Many are from the many International Society of Caricature Artists conventions I’ve been to, but many more are unsolicited submissions from artists who just send them in to be included. I just updated it last week with dozens of recent entries, and currently there are 255 different caricatures of yours truly… if you haven’t seen this you should check it out. Given… READ MORE
October 12th, 2010 | Posted in MAD Magazine
Last night’s episode of MAD on the Cartoon Network had one of the segments I worked on… this one was called “Batman Family Feud”. Here is some of the art I did for the animators to work with: I’m not sure why they decided to go with a combination of the 1989 movie Michael Keaton Batman, the “Batman Begins”/”Dark Knight Returns” Michael Caine Alfred and the 60’s TV show Robin and Batgirl. The Riddler they wanted to be generic, and neither Frank Gorshin nor Jim Carrey. I think these drawings represent the style of finishes that work best with the animation needs, are are the… READ MORE
