Tom's Mad Blog
September 26th, 2021 | Posted in Mailbag
Q: What are your thoughts on The Walt Disney Company’s barrage of lawsuits on Friday? A: Here’s a link to another story about this issue. For those tl;dr folks here’s the brief version: Earlier this year the heirs/estates of several artists and writers who created Marvel characters like Spider-Man, Thor, etc. filed lawsuits against Disney (owners of Marvel) claiming copyrights to the characters should revert back to them after a 60 year time limit under the Copyright Revision Act of 1976. Disney recently filed countersuits saying the characters were created under a “work for hire” arrangement, and therefore the copyright claims are invalid. My thoughts?… READ MORE
September 24th, 2021 | Posted in General
Things are getting hairy in the studio. We might be seeing this ugly mug a bit in the next week or two. READ MORE
September 23rd, 2021 | Posted in Illustration Throwback Thursday
Back in the early 2000’s I did a lot of work for Scholastic, mostly spot illustrations for their various publications, and occasionally covers. This was the cover of one of their school magazines I did in late 2007, and the story was about how online social sites were going to be a a new major part of political candidate’s campaigns in 2008. Little did we know. Gotta love the “MySpace” appearance. In 2007 it was the biggest social media platform in the world, and Facebook was a just started minor player. Again, little did we know. READ MORE
September 22nd, 2021 | Posted in Sketch O'The Week
I ran across this sketch in an old but barely used sketchbook I started using again… Aaron Paul from “Breaking Bad”. I think I posted it back in 2012 but for some reason many of the posts I did in 2012 have corrupted image files that don’t appear… so here it is again! It’s a little smaller than most of my SotWs, so it’s at a bargain price in the Studio Store. READ MORE
September 21st, 2021 | Posted in News
In just a couple of weeks I’ll be at New York Comic Con, which will mark the first major comic con I’ve appeared at since C2E2 back in Feb of 2020, when the world was so naive and COVID-19 was something we’d just started hearing rumbles about. Well, in celebration of being back at in-person cons, I’m releasing a new book Sketch o’the Week, Vol 4! Like the previous three volumes, this one is chock full of sketches and other works from the last 16 months or so (100 caricatures, in fact). I’m placing it in the Studio Store for preordering if anyone is interested.… READ MORE
September 20th, 2021 | Posted in MAD Magazine
Holy Monday, Batman! It’s another episode of our chronological crawl through my twenty years of work at MAD Magazine. Today we have a look at another superhero movie spoof, “Battyman Begone” written by my CLAPTRAP cohort Desmond Devlin and first appearing in MAD #455, July 2005. As a huge Batman fan, this job was a genuine thrill to do. Batman was what got me hooked on comics and cartooning back when I was a little kid. I watched the reruns of the Adam West TV show in the late 60’s and early 70’s, and was obsessed with the character. My parents scoured garage sales for… READ MORE
September 19th, 2021 | Posted in Mailbag
Q: For most of its history MAD had a circulation of 8 issues a year. Then, when DC Comics took over, the number of issues went from 8 issues to a monthly magazine until issue #499. From #500 it was 4 issues for awhile and ultimately went up to 6 issues a year. Do you think the quality of MAD Magazine went down when it was a monthly issue? Do you think it should have remained at 8 issues a year. How was the general response to MAD being issued out 4 times a year.. and ultimately coming out 6 times a year? How many issues a… READ MORE
September 17th, 2021 | Posted in General
Some months ago Quentin Tarantino released a novelized version of his film “Once Upon a Time… in Hollywood”, and it was just announced that there is a deluxe hardcover version coming out in November that will include a bunch of extra goodies… including the second parody Andrew Secunda and I did of the fictional “Bounty Law” TV show for a mini-MAD that was exclusive to the “Collector’s Edition Ultra HD Blu-Ray” of the film. That mini-MAD was pretty hard to come by, but I would think this hardcover book will be easy to get. If you didn’t get the Blu-Ray exclusive one, here’s your chance… READ MORE
