Tom's Mad Blog
March 8th, 2023 | Posted in Sketch O'The Week
In a rare break from the usual, this original sketch is still available in the Studio Store! It’s another sketch from our quickly getting old series “TV shows Tom watched as a kid after school”. This week features Bill Bixby and Ray Walston from the 1963-66 sitcom “My Favorite Martian”. There was a period of time where this show was on every day at the exit time I got home from school, and I saw a lot of episodes… although I don’t remember any of the later full color ones. I sort of categorized this show with “I Dream of Jeannie” and “Bewitched”, since there… READ MORE
March 6th, 2023 | Posted in MAD Magazine
On no! Monday again?!? It’s that same Bat-time to check on the same Bat-channel that is our look back at my work for MAD Magazine! This week we take a peek at what might be my favorite job I ever did for the magazine, MAD‘s parody of “The Dark Knight Rises”, written by Arnie Kogen and first appearing in MAD #519, February 2013. Why is this my favorite piece for MAD? Several reasons. For one, I’m a huge Batman fan and this was the last of the Christopher Nolan trilogy films, for which I got to do the art for all three. Also this might… READ MORE
March 1st, 2023 | Posted in Sketch O'The Week
You’ll twitch your nose at this, but it’s time for another “Sketch o’the Week” in the distinctly unmagical series known as “TV shows Tom watched after school as a kid”. This week we should burn at the stake for our sketch of the stars of the 1960-70’s sitcom “Bewitched”, Elizabeth Montgomery, Dick York and Dick Sargent! This show has more Dicks in it than Brett Farve‘s text archives! This was one of my favorite after-school reruns to watch as a kid. One of the two “magical” sitcoms (along with “I Dream of Jeannie”), “Bewitched” had a different spin on the “supernatural character in the real world” concept. Unlike IDoJ,… READ MORE
February 22nd, 2023 | Posted in Sketch O'The Week
Here’s another one for the “Sketch o’the Week” series “TV shows Tom watched after school as a kid”. This week we weigh anchor with a sketch of three of the main characters from “McHale’s Navy”, Ernest Borgnine, Tim Conway and Joe Flynn! This show was one that wasn’t in syndication as much as some others in my area, so I didn’t see it a lot. For a year or so it was on pretty regularly and I was interested in it not so much for the humor and stories as I was fascinated by Tim Conway being in it. My parents loved “The Carol Burnett Show” and I… READ MORE
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
