Tom's Mad Blog

Another MAD #499 Sneak Peek

February 9th, 2009 | Posted in MAD Magazine

The guys at MAD are releasing a lot of sneak peek exclusives of issue #499 on the internet… this one comes courtesy of the Walletpop Blog. It’s a small image but there you have it. READ MORE

Weekly Newspaper Spot

February 9th, 2009 | Posted in On the Drawing Board

Here is this week’s column spot illustration for “The Independent“. I am told this feature will have a total of eight of these caricatures. This is number seven. This has been a fun little project because these illustrations are done quickly and loosely, without a lot of overthinking. READ MORE

Sunday Mailbag

February 8th, 2009 | Posted in Mailbag

Q: Obviously most freelancers start at the bottom of the barrel and in the beginning of their career may take on some less glamorous jobs. However, once they start becoming a bit more established and gain bigger clients, how do they separate themselves from previous clients in order to focus on the jobs that they had been trying to get in the first place? A: A freelancer is not a factory, where you can add more employees and equipment to increase production when demand gets high. As a single artist you can only produce so much work. Therefore, once you reach a point where you… READ MORE

Poker Website Project

February 7th, 2009 | Posted in Freelancing

Click for a closer look… Several months ago I did a little side project for a couple of enterpenuers who were designing and building a poker play website. They wanted a more fun, humorous and cartoony environment and feel to the game than your typical video game looking sites. The results are now online at www.5PMPoker.com. The project was pretty involved. First I needed to design a playing environment that would be fun and unique, but would also work within the dimensions they needed. They wanted some silly animations that would either randomly move or move when some goal or event happened in the game.… READ MORE

MAD #499 Sneak Peek!

February 6th, 2009 | Posted in MAD Magazine

This is out “in the wild” on the interwebby and will be in MAD #499: You have to feel a little sorry for the guy, but how stupid can you be? Doesn’t he have any handlers or advisers around to tell him taking hits off bongs at parties where everyone has a camera in their cell phone is not going to be kept a secret? READ MORE

Ready to Watch the Watchmen

February 6th, 2009 | Posted in General

I am officially getting excited about the Watchmen movie, especially after I saw this “public service announcement” recently: [youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n5WsciSNVS0[/youtube] There are a lot of fans of the graphic novel that are still worried about the film adaptation of their beloved Watchmen falling short of expectations. I’m not one of them, even though I am an enormous fan of the original Alan Moore/Dave Gibbons masterpiece. Why not? Simply put, there is no possible way for a film, unless it was 10 hours long, to capture all the intricacies and subtleties of the graphic novel, so I don’t expect it to. The Watchmen is incredibly involved… I… READ MORE

25 Random Things About Me

February 6th, 2009 | Posted in General

This has been all the rage on Facebook for the last week or two. The concept is that you write a note with 25 random facts about yourself and then “tag” 25 of your Facebook friends with the results. They in turn need to do the same, tagging 25 of their friends and so on. Ordinarily I hate these kinds of things. I get seemingly endless invites to join all sorts of goofy groups and add applications on Facebook that I always ignore, but this one is kind of fun. So, since not everyone is on Facebook (and sorry to those who saw this there… READ MORE

Time Warner Woes

February 5th, 2009 | Posted in MAD Magazine

If there was ever any doubt that Time Warner’s financial struggles were a key factor in MAD‘s switching to quarterly publication and laying off several (more) staffers, this article from My Way News should squash it: Time Warner swings to 4Q loss on hefty writedown TW lost $16.03 billion in the last quarter of 2008. Knowing all that was going down, is it any wonder TW sold all the remaining and most valuable original MAD cover artwork, and then cut publication and personnel? It was a company wide bloodletting, and althogh recent drops in circulation didn’t help even if MAD was still selling over 200,000… READ MORE

Instagram

Claptrap Ad

GICLEES

Workshop Ad

007 ad

Catwoman ad

Dracula ad

Doctor Who ad

Superman ad

NCS