Tom's Mad Blog
September 2nd, 2007 | Posted in Mailbag
Q: I read your blog post about drawing at a camp for mentally disabled people. I was wondering how do you handle drawing people with obvious physical and mental handicaps? Some subjects, like those with Downs syndrome or Multiple Sclerosis have very obvious physical traits. Do you ignore them? Gloss over them? Exaggerate them? What about people with disfigurements from accidents or such? How do you handle that? A: Great question. It’s natural to be concerned about how to treat such matters when doing live caricatures. The artist is concerned about the sensitivity of the subject, what they are thinking (or their parents) and how… READ MORE
September 1st, 2007 | Posted in General
A few days ago I posted the Deadline Demon, as I am occasionally wont to do, and I got a few comments from some readers saying how they like and use the image as chat icons. I posted the following comment of my own: I don’t know what to say to that, gentlemen. I’m flattered, but you do realize that you shouldn’t just take any image you want to from the internet and use it for whatever you want to use it for? You should at the very least ask permission of the creator, be it myself or anyone. I got two responses, one a… READ MORE
August 31st, 2007 | Posted in General
Being a fan of spy novel master Frederick Forsyth, I have naturally sampled the wares of other authors who write in the genre. Some bring something of their own to the table… Tom Clancy‘s books are much heavier on the modern techno/cyber war elements, for example. Some are more like pale imitations of Forsyth. Robert Ludlum, the author of the “Jason Bourne” books among many others, falls somewhere in between. His books follow the Forsyth pattern of strong, formidable, often reluctant heros who have few equals going up against large organizations that are corrupt, evil and destructive, with sweeping descriptions of exotic locales and plenty… READ MORE
August 30th, 2007 | Posted in General
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August 29th, 2007 | Posted in Sketch O'The Week
Here’s something a little different for “Sketch O’The Week”. This was a rough sketch for one of several spot illustrations to accompany a story in Fade In Magazine about Hollywood talent agents. The assignment was to do a full page and three spots illustrating some of the points interviewed insiders were making about agents and how they operate. This one was rejected as they didn’t understand what I was trying to convey… the idea was to visually demonstrate how agents like to throw money around driving expensive cars, etc. Of course, a BMW Z-3 is hardly a super car, but I like drawing that car.… READ MORE
August 28th, 2007 | Posted in News
It’s “back to school” time! In honor of that, and because I am way too busy right now to write any meaningful blog posts, I am reminding everybody about the scholarships in cartooning that the National Cartoonist Society’s NCS Foundation have available. Again, the scholarships are not tied to a single school or even to an art major. They are about encouraging young artists to pursue careers in cartooning, be they animators, comic book artists, editorial cartoonists, strip cartoonists… you name it. You apply by filling out an application and sending in 5 samples of your cartooning. The amounts and number of scholarships are up… READ MORE
August 27th, 2007 | Posted in It's All Geek to Me!
Despite being a bit swamped with jobs, I took a few moments out of each of the last few days to accomplish a task I’ve been trying to find time to do for some time: import the entire, unabridged audiobook recordings of J.R.R. Tolkien‘s The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings into iTunes and therefore into my iPod. I had previously accomplished this a few years ago, but that was before my researching how to do it properly (and in fact before the proper software was available to do it right in the first place). Additionally, I had used iTunes 5 to import the… READ MORE
August 26th, 2007 | Posted in Mailbag
Q: When you do those MAD crowd scenes adding the extra’s with the celebrities- have you used people you meet (your mailman, barber, your kids sport coaches, neighbor etc.) as those extra’s in the crowd? I would think it would be fun to tell/hint to those people “hey check out the new MAD I added you in a scene.” A: Yes, I often add people I know into the parodies I do. One of the first and most valuable lessons I learned from the folks at MAD, from Sam Viviano and Nick Meglin in particular, was that I needed to create cohesion in my “art… READ MORE
