Tom's Mad Blog
February 11th, 2009 | Posted in Sketch O'The Week
This week’s subject is the late, great Paul Newman. When Newman passed away last year it occured to The Lovely Anna and I that we had never seen many of the movies that made him famous and were heralded as high points of his career. I had seen “Cool Hand Luke” a few times,¬¨‚Ć “Slap Shot” (one of the greatest sports movies of all time) and a few other Newman films from the 80’s on, but not many of his older movies.¬¨‚Ć So, we made it a point to rent some of his classics. “The Sting” and “Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid” were the… READ MORE
February 10th, 2009 | Posted in General
Right now I am deeply immersed in trying to kick out a 13 page full color promotional comic book that is to be given away as a promo item for the movie “Super Capers”. I did a bunch of illustration work for the film, which will appear during the opening credits and in a flashback scene near the beginning of the movie. The movie will debut in select theaters on March 20th, and if sells a predetermined number of tickets it will get picked up by a major distributor (there is a deal in place) and will be shown in about 2000 theaters this summer.… READ MORE
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
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
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
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
