Tom's Mad Blog
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
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
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
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
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
February 4th, 2009 | Posted in Sketch O'The Week
Here’s another “cold” sketch where I was completely unfamiliar with the subject. When you attempt a drawing like that you are entirely dependent on that one photo reference to provide all the information for your drawing. That makes it superficial and often causes it to lack life and/or the kind of strong likeness and personality you can get by drawing someone who’s features and mannerisms you are more familiar with. This is Oscar nominated actress Amy Adams from the movie “Doubt”. I should be more familiar with her as she is a hometown girl from Minneapolis. I thought she had an interesting nose and fun… READ MORE
February 3rd, 2009 | Posted in General
In the wake of the “MAD going quarterly” announcement, one common response I’ve read is that MAD didn’t make any real attempts to create an internet presence to compliment (supplement?) it’s printed incarnation, and that helped lead to the circulation difficulties. I’m not sure how anyone works out that offering MAD content for free on the internet would somehow equate to getting people to pay for content in a magazine, but certainly in terms of introducing MAD to new young readers who spend most of their time on the internet, it makes some sense. Almost all magazines these days have websites with some kind of… READ MORE
February 2nd, 2009 | Posted in On the Drawing Board
Something a little different this week for The Independent… one of the column’s characters is a groundhog in honor of Groundhog’s Day. I’m told we’ll be back to doing local politicians for next week’s column. READ MORE
