Tom's Mad Blog
August 2nd, 2018 | Posted in News
When I was in Toronto doing a workshop I was a guest on a podcast called “Cashing in on Creativity”. You can listen to it here. This podcast a great show, over 80 episodes so far, focusing on the business side of the creative arts hosted by Bruce Outridge. Besides being a terrific podcast host, Bruce also a talented artist and caricaturist as well as an author and entrepreneur. We chat about the world of illustration, the passing of Nick Meglin, how I got started with MAD and a bunch of other stuff. Bruce’s podcast series is well worth listening to if you are in… READ MORE
August 1st, 2018 | Posted in Sketch O'The Week
I’m crazy busy right now and about to start an insane amount of traveling over the next three months. The “Sketch o’the Week” might see some old sketches and work thrown in for the foreseeable future. BUT that gives me a chance to do something I’ve been meaning to do anyway… post some of the rough sketches I did for various MAD jobs both here and in the Studio Store. These are what I would call “roughs” for the parodies I do for MAD. I do them on the computer most of the time these days, but I spent 15 plus years doing them in… READ MORE
July 31st, 2018 | Posted in News
Visit me this weekend at Tampa Bay Comic Con in the Tampa Convention center! The Lovely Anna and I will be at table G-9 in the “Guest Artists Alley” area. I’ll have plenty of crap to sell including my new “Purrrfectly catty” limited edition print and other prints, books, comics, and of course caricatures and commissions. READ MORE
July 30th, 2018 | Posted in MAD Magazine
This week’s Monday MADness is a look at MAD‘s parody of the TV show “[scrubs]” from MAD #426, Feb 2003. This was the only article I ever illustrated that was written by longtime MAD editor Charlie Kadau. There are a couple of “insider” cameos in this splash. The guy in the black shirt and the severed arm in the lower right was my physical trainer at the time, Rich Dolan. I thew him in there just for fun. The guy with the glasses putting on the rubber glove next to Kevorkian is former MAD associate editor Greg Leitman, who happened to be college roommates with… READ MORE
July 29th, 2018 | Posted in Mailbag
Q: Your new MAD parodies now have rounded corner dialogue boxes. Why? A: When the Burbank staff took over I was told they wanted to have rounded corners on all the word boxes in the parodies. So we went from this: From “Rough One”, MAD #545 To this: From “Star Bores: Half Assed Jedi”, MAD #1 Why? No reason other than just to give it a little bit different look, I guess. I was not given a real reason. It serves no functional purpose, so just aesthetics. It’s a huge pain in the ass for me, since I hand ink these balloons. Now instead of… READ MORE
July 27th, 2018 | Posted in News
The National Cartoonists Society recently announced their first international comic arts festival, NCSFEST, taking place in Huntington Beach, CA in May of 2019. You may say “what… another comic con???”, but you’d be badly mistaken to compare what NCSFEST is going to be and your typical U.S. comic con. This festival is patterned after some of the highly regarded European fests like the UK’s Lakes International Comic Arts Festival and France’s Lyon BD Festival. NCSFEST won’t be held in some cavernous convention center, but like their European counterparts it will take over an entire town, in this case Huntington Beach, with a huge street fair… READ MORE
July 26th, 2018 | Posted in General
Superstar comic book artist and fellow National Cartoonist Society member Graham Nolan invited me to contribute a full page piece of pin-up art for his Kickstarter project, which features two books: Graham Nolan’s MONSTER ISLAND 20th Anniversary Creator Edition and Black Book: the Art of GRAHAM NOLAN! Both books look to be fantastic, which is not surprising considering Graham is one the THE best in the business. My print will be part of the “Monster Island Print Set” pledge level, which features at least eight 11″ x 17″ plates of new Monster Island images by real artists like Lee Weeks, Jose Luis Garcia-Lopez, Butch Guice,… READ MORE
July 25th, 2018 | Posted in Sketch O'The Week
I am still really swamped trying to play catch up from San Diego Comic-Con, so here’s a flashback sketch that I did back in 2011 and then added the grays to before putting it in my book… Sarah Jessica Parker. READ MORE
