Tom's Mad Blog
August 30th, 2006 | Posted in On the Drawing Board
Deadlines conquered. Here are some images of the jobs I just finished and am working on now. The first two are from my latest MAD job entitled “When Video Games Become Religious”. Like the “Rejected Cars Characters” of a few issues ago, this was a little different than my usual work for MAD. “Damn, it’s that same stupid shape again!” “What would Jesus do?” The challenge here was that I needed to draw images both from the “video game” world and the “real” world, and make it obvious there is a difference between the two. In order to accomplish this, I needed to make the… READ MORE
August 29th, 2006 | Posted in General
Yep. Here we go again! I should have some images to post later today or tomorrow from the current frenzy! READ MORE
August 28th, 2006 | Posted in General
Judging from the flood of e-mails and phone calls I recieved yesterday, the rumors of the death of the comics pages are greatly exaggerated. Yes, that was “me” making a cameo appearance in the 8/27 Sunday strip “Pearls Before Swine” and, yes, I really did draw that caricature of Barbara Streisand in it. No, it was not my idea to be labeled “probably the best caricaturist in the country”… Stephan exaggerates much more than I do in my drawings. Here’s the strip: Click for a closer look I met “Pearls before Swine” creator Stephan Pastis at an NCS Reuben Awards weekend in San Francisco in… READ MORE
August 27th, 2006 | Posted in Mailbag
Q: How do you scan your inked originals for coloring in PhotoShop? A: I have an oversized flatbed scanner, the Microtek 9800XL, which has a live scan area of 12 inches by 17 inches. Even with the large bed,??ᬨ‚Ćmy pages are often??ᬨ‚Ćbigger than this, so I scan??ᬨ‚Ćthem in sections and piece??ᬨ‚Ćthem together in PhotoShop. Most of the time I ink my drawings at 150% of the size they print at, and in the case of MAD work it’s at 200% (MAD tradition). The poster image I inked for the inking tutorial, for example, had a print size of 17 x 17 inches. Those posters are… READ MORE
August 26th, 2006 | Posted in General
I get questioned a lot about the state of MAD movie parodies, usually from people lamenting them as shorter, less frequent and sometimes weaker than the ones in the past. There was a time when the latest issue of MAD could be counted on to have at least one movie parody and one TV show parody in it, and often more than one. The parodies averaged over 6 pages in length, and the targets were usually highly regarded dramas and films that were either critically acclaimed, box office hits or both. Artsy, off the wall films like “A Clockwork Orange” got the MAD treatment as… READ MORE
August 25th, 2006 | Posted in General
A few days ago I added a new category of post called “Tutorials” in an attempt to allow readers to easily find these features without the need for a cumbersome search. It turns out that isn’t the best solution, as it will eventually require people to click over multiple pages to find what they are looking for. Instead, I have added two new “Pages” to the blog. WordPress, the excellent blog program I use here, has a nice feature where you can create web pages within the blog for whatever purpose you want. The links to these pages are at the top of the blogroll… READ MORE
August 25th, 2006 | Posted in General
It’s not too often I add links to my blogroll or recommend any websites, because… well… there are lot of really good ones and if I linked to them all that’s all I’d have time to do! That said, there are a few I’ve recently come across that have become musts on the “visit every day” list for me I thought I’d share. Drawn! is, in it’s own words, a “collaborative weblog for illustrators, artists, cartoonists, and anyone who likes to draw.”??ᬨ‚ĆPopulated with contributions from a number of terrific artists including fellow NCS member Jay Stephens, Drawn! is filled with links to great sites, blogs,… READ MORE
August 24th, 2006 | Posted in General
A long time ago a friend of mine showed me a photocopy of a collection of comic book style panels called “Wally Wood’s 22 panels that always work!”. Supposedly put together by the legendary Wood, they showed 22 different panel designs that could be used at almost any time within a comic book story to help give a boring “talking heads” part of a script some visual interest. I thought it was pretty smart. For years I’d been looking for a copy of it. In the last week it’s been getting a lot of circulation on the Internet on cartoon and comic blogs and forums,… READ MORE
