Tom's Mad Blog
March 2nd, 2010 | Posted in Freelancing
…you’re getting too old to pull multiple all nighters you find yourself staring at two deadlines, one a last minute rush job for your best client and an unusual family issue tossed in the mix and all of a sudden it’s Tuesday and you haven’t slept since you woke up on Sunday morning. Ah, well. Plenty of sleep tonight… maybe right now actually. In the meantime here is a rare real painting I did last week for an equally rare non-publication job. This is an executive who was a big MAD fan as a kid, commissioned as a gift (at the last minute, ‘natch). Very… READ MORE
March 1st, 2010 | Posted in Freelancing
Blechhh….. READ MORE
February 28th, 2010 | Posted in Mailbag
Q: This question is concerning line weight with multi-panel illustrations. It’s probably an illustration 101 concern, and I know you touch on it a bit in your inking tutorial, but maybe you wouldn’t mind fielding it for me anyways. Do you illustrate the entire composition on one page or do you pencil and ink the panels separately and then put them together after (example: Two and a Half Wits for MAD)? How important is it to maintain the same average line thickness, with regard to depth, in each panel? A: I always rough out, draw and ink the entire page of a comic book style… READ MORE
February 27th, 2010 | Posted in News
The eternal fanboy question. Turns out (at least for now) in the context of capitalism Batman owns Superman. Just days after the record shattering sale of Action Comics #1 for $1,000,000.00, a private collector has purchased a copy of Detective Comics #27, featuring the first appearance of “The Bat-Man”, for $1,075,500 at a Dallas auction through Heritage Auction Galleries. According to the story, the seller originally bought the copy in the 1960’s for $100. Holy Compound Interest, Batman! Assuming he bought it in 1969, that’s about a 25.4% annal return on that investment over 41 years. Thomas Wayne would have been proud! READ MORE
February 27th, 2010 | Posted in MAD Magazine
Cameo of Monroe I did in “Stuporman Returns“ “Monroe” was one of those things in MAD you either loved or hated. Those who loved it really were over the top for it… I was one of those. I loved the strip, it’s dark humor and the incredible artwork by Bill Wray. Maybe it wasn’t for everybody, but it did reach out to a newer, less traditional audience and MAD needed that. Bill has long ago moved on and is concentrating these days on his fine art work, but he still maintains a blog about his cartooning and had posted this look at the very first… READ MORE
February 26th, 2010 | Posted in General
Way back in 1954 MAD lead off issue number 12 with a soon-to-be-classic parody of the comic book “Archie”, written by the late, inimitable Harvey Kurtzman and drawn by the late, incomparable Will Elder. Kurtzman, as is well known, had some disagreements with MAD publisher Bill Gaines over pretty much everything and took his show on the road to the House of Hugh (Hefner, that is… AKA Playboy) to produce the short lived humor magazine Trump! which lasted only two wonderful but expensive-to-produce issues, and also included the likes of Will Elder. Harvey and Will stuck together with Humbug (11 issues, 1957-58), and later had… READ MORE
February 25th, 2010 | Posted in News
Cover art by Bill Janocha I received a pleasant surprise in my mailbox yesterday… the newest issue of Stay Tooned! Magazine in all it’s hot-off-the-press glory. I also got a lot of pre-approved credit card offers, but they were considerably less thrilling. Still, anything addressed to me (and I count “Current Resident” as being addressed to me) in the mailbox in the middle of a Minnesota winter is something. When your mail is delivered by dogsled even the junk mail is welcome. Stay Tooned! is far from junk mail, though… that is genuine “glad to see it” mail. Publisher John Read continues his string of… READ MORE
February 24th, 2010 | Posted in MAD Magazine
While Dick De Bartolo is not actually a monkey as depicted above (this was the only caricature I have drawn of him, hence the silly post title) he will no doubt be doing plenty of monkeying around on “Stu’s Show” today on Shokus Internet Radio. If you are not familiar with Shokus Internet Radio, it’s a… wait for it…. radio station on the internet. Stu Shokus has a live broadcast on Wednesdays, and callers and e-mailers can pose questions to his guests who are “top celebrities from the world of television, both in front of and behind the cameras”. Writer extraordinaire Mark Evanier is a… READ MORE
