Tom's Mad Blog
March 19th, 2021 | Posted in General
Last week Saturday we celebrated the 100th birthday of the amazing Al Jaffee. Former MAD art director and longtime MAD artist Sam Viviano organized a P.O. Box for anyone and everyone to send him birthday wishes for Al, which Sam delivered to Al on his big day. Sam told me he got over 400 cards and letters! Al will probably be 101 by the time he opens them all. The above was what I sent him. It’s the original inks for the spot illustration I did for MAD #14, which I watercolored and did some scribbling on. I thought I’d share it here. A huge… READ MORE
March 18th, 2021 | Posted in MAD Magazine
MAD collector Tim Johnson has an annual (sometimes more than annual) auction of MAD collectibles that always features very cool and sometimes extremely rare MAD junk. Tim may be a world class MAD collector but this year his auction brochure cover is as classless as it gets. This is a spoof of a famous Frank Zappa poster image, done at Tim’s suggestion. If you are interested in Tim’s auction you can check it out here. It’s done via email and at the end telephone, so no eBay involved. READ MORE
March 17th, 2021 | Posted in Daily Coronacature
Here’s my sketch of today’s “The Daily Coronacature” subject- Albert Einstein! As usual, the original is available in my Studio Store. Today is the one year anniversary of the start of “The Daily Coronacature”! On March 17th, 2020, I posted and drew our first subject… Eugene Levy. That was 366 days ago. It’s been a long year, but our little daily drawing exercise has been a fun distraction. I did it all myself for 100 days, then brought in a couple of others to start picking the subjects and posting on the Facebook Group Page and our Instagram account. I’ve just been choosing the Wednesday… READ MORE
March 17th, 2021 | Posted in General
Happy St. Paddy’s Day! After one of those DNA tests a few years ago I discovered I am actually 3% Irish! No wonder I like Guiness so much! The above image was done for Warner Bros Consumer Products for a T-Shirt that they no doubt have stacks of gathering dust in the “clearance” bins: READ MORE
March 16th, 2021 | Posted in News
I’m not sure if you are aware of this, but some things happened in 2020 that forced me to cancel or postpone a bunch of my in-person caricature workshops. It’s a long story but last May this motley crew seen above was SUPPOSED to spend the weekend drawing together in Long Island City, NY. We had to postpone the workshop and then tried to reschedule it for August, optimistically thinking the pandemic would be under control by then. Well… it wasn’t. I was able to squeeze in a couple of workshops in Detroit and Chicago during the short-lived downtick in the pandemic this past late… READ MORE
March 15th, 2021 | Posted in MAD Magazine
We continue our Monday MADness chronological crawl through my work for MAD with a look at appearance number 17 for me in the magazine. This was a feature MAD occasionally did called “A MAD Peek Behind the Scenes on the set of…” which was a sort of parody of whatever show or movie was the subject. I ended up doing a few of these over the years, this being the first. It was written by the late, great John Caldwell and appeared in MAD #422, Oct 2002. It was the only time I ever did the art for a fully Caldwell written piece, although he was one of… READ MORE
March 14th, 2021 | Posted in Mailbag
Q: What was your very first freelance job? A: My first truly professional freelance job, meaning for an actual company and not a personal commission or a live caricature, I did while still a student in art college, and it nicely opened my eyes to the realities of art direction and working with difficult clients. During my third year of college at the then named “School of Associated Arts” in St. Paul, MN., I was approached by the head of the design department about doing a job for him. It was fairly well known throughout the small school (my graduating class: 40 students) that I… READ MORE
March 13th, 2021 | Posted in General
The words “legendary” and “genius” get thrown around an awful lot these days, but if there is anyone in the world of cartooning to whom these words truly apply it would be the great Al Jaffee, who turns 100 years old today. MAD Magazine has had many artists work for them whose level of talent and skill have been off the charts: Jack Davis, Mort Drucker, Wally Wood, Harvey Kurtzman, Will Elder, Sergio Aragonés, Don Martin… the list keeps on going and going. Some were incredible visual artists like Drucker, Wood, Elder, and Davis, some were unique combinations of written and visual humor like Kurtzman, Sergio,… READ MORE
