Tom's Mad Blog
February 20th, 2023 | Posted in MAD Magazine
Fail to the Chief! It’s Monday again, which means it’s time to run another one of the jobs I did for MAD up the flagpole and give it a one fingered salute! This week we leave the world of multiple page, time consuming, research heavy, labor-intensive TV/movie parodies and get away with a really easy assignment… a two page spread that’s mostly the U.S. Flag! The best part about this job is I got paid the same page rate for this as for one of those crazy movie parody splash pages. Factoring in the time involved I went from earning about $3 per hour to… READ MORE
February 15th, 2023 | Posted in Sketch O'The Week
It’s another entry into the “Sketch o’the Week” series no one asked for called “TV shows Tom watched after school as a kid”. This week we draw the 60’s TV sitcom star everyone was in love with… and Larry Hagman. “I Dream of Jeannie” was one of those shows I always stopped to watch when flipping through the channels (all three of them) after school in the 1970’s. Sure, I was a little in love with Barbara Eden… who wasn’t? She was gorgeous, funny, charming, and the perfect zany comic foil to the straight laced Hagman. The show ran for five seasons, and was one of the… READ MORE
February 13th, 2023 | Posted in MAD Magazine
Here we go with another super-lame look back at my work for MAD Magazine. This week we go back to the endless well that is super-hero movies and revisit MAD‘s spoof of “The Avengers”, written by MAD‘s MADdest writer Dick Debartolo and first appearing in MAD #517, October 2012. If you are looking at these pencil roughs and thinking “these are a lot looser and sketchier than Tom’s usual pencils” you are not crazy. I was making a conscious effort at the time to keep the roughs to a minimum of detail and spend more time drawing things out on the boards, rather than wasting… READ MORE
February 9th, 2023 | Posted in MAD Magazine
MAD #30 just dropped, and will be available in comic book shops and in subscriber mailboxes soon. It’s a “technology” themed issue, and among the reprinted content is one of my favorite spoofs I drew for the “new” MAD, a spoof of the movie “Ready Player One”… splash page pictured above. This was a seven pager written by Desmond Devlin and featuring seemingly endless cameos of every sci-fi, comic book, fantasy, video game and other pop culture character you could shake a stick at. A collector named Mark Faerber bought all seven pages of the original art from this parody shortly after it came out.… READ MORE
February 8th, 2023 | Posted in Sketch O'The Week
Here we go with our newest sketch series entitled “TV shows Tom watched after school as a kid”. This week we visit Stalag 13 and everybody’s favorite lovable looney Nazis! This might be the most unlikely sitcom in the history of TV, and that includes all those starring an unattractive male comedian who somehow had a super hot wife. “Hogan’s Heroes” a COMEDY set in a World War II nazi prisoner of war camp. The nazi’s were all incompetent idiots and the camp was a cover for a covert Allied special ops team that did all manner of espionage, sabotage and resistance assistance. Our sketch… READ MORE
February 6th, 2023 | Posted in General
I knew I shoulda turned left at Albequerque! Welcome to another miserable MAD Monday, where we continue our decent into the drug-addled abyss that was my work for MAD Magazine. When you think about it, this whole look back at my MAD work is a little like meth… it makes you sick and you don’t want to keep doing it but now that we’ve started we just can’t stop! This week we take a look at one of my favorite pieces I did for the magazine. One of the questions I get asked a lot is “is it easier to do a spoof of a… READ MORE
February 1st, 2023 | Posted in Sketch O'The Week
After last week’s sketch of Jenna Ortega as Wednesday Addams from the recent TV show “Wednesday”, I was waxing nostalgic about the original 60’s “The Addam’s Family” show. I really loved watching the reruns of that show on TV as a kid, which were a staple of after school TV along with “The Munsters”, “Gilligan’s Island” and a lot of other half hour sitcoms. So, I could not resist doing a sketch of the original TV Gomez and Morticia, John Astin and Carolyn Jones. That got me thinking it would be fun to do a series of caricatures from other TV shows I watched after school as a kid! Most… READ MORE
January 30th, 2023 | Posted in MAD Magazine
If Monday’s seem like a bleak and barren wasteland of tedium seeming to stretch ahead forever, then this post fits right in! It’s time for another dystopian dive into the dreary dregs of drawing that was my work for MAD Magazine… and the odds are forever NOT in your favor! Yes, you are the tribute sentenced to having to look back at my artwork for MAD‘s spoof of the film “The Hunger Games”, written by my CLAPTRAP cohort Desmond Devlin and first appearing in MAD #515, June 2012. I don’t have a lot to say about this job other than I sort of liked the… READ MORE
