Tom's Mad Blog
August 15th, 2021 | Posted in General
Q: Do you ever get criticized or praised for people perceiving your work as similar to Mort Drucker? I see the differences, but just was wondering how you as an artist have dealt with that comparison. A: I spent 20 years drawing caricature/likeness based movie and TV parodies for MAD Magazine. The comparisons to Mort Drucker and other famous MAD artists like Jack Davis, Angelo Torres, etc are inevitable. I have a drawing style based on line (as opposed to values like a painter), my caricatures lean more toward likeness than exaggeration, and my storytelling comes from a comic book background. Anyone who does that… READ MORE
August 13th, 2021 | Posted in MAD Magazine
Last week Saturday comedian Trevor Moore passed away at 41 in a what is being referred to as a “tragic accident” in a residential yard in Los Angeles. So far no details have been released. Moore was one of the founders of the NYC comedy group “The Whitest Kids U Know”, which ran for 5 season on the Independent Film Channel. Back in 2008 MAD did a “special advertising section” insert in issue #486 (and I think a number of other DC Comics publications) that promoted “The Whitest Kids U Know” show on IFC. It was kind of a mini MAD with a cover by… READ MORE
August 12th, 2021 | Posted in Illustration Throwback Thursday
Since we were strolling down memory lane with my sketch of Al & Peg Bundy yesterday, I thought we’d take a look back as some of the “Married…with Children” comic book work I did way back in the early 90’s. The above was a promo ad for the title, and here’s a bunch of covers. Some I pencilled only, some I also inked, and one I did the color and all. NOW switched from doing a regular numbered series to a series of multiple issue “miniseries” that were built around a themed storyline. The cover above was the first in a series of four where… READ MORE
August 11th, 2021 | Posted in Sketch O'The Week
This week’s sketch is another TV show that could have been part of that “History of the Sitcom” piece I did for CNN… Katey Sagal and Ed O’Neill as Peg and Al Bundy from “Married… with Children”. As always, the original is available in the Studio Store. This show has a special significance to me because from 1990 to 1994 I did the pencils for about 25 issues of the “Married… with Children” comic book for NOW Comics. That was a lot of drawings of the Bundys done by a young artist whose skill set still needed a lot of work and growth. Fortunately I… READ MORE
August 10th, 2021 | Posted in General
Last year’s virtual NCSFest and Reuben Awards weekend, conducted jointly with the Lakes International Comic Arts Festival, was a pretty big success, so the National Cartoonists Society is doing it again in 2021. On October 15th & 16th, the NCS will live stream a combination of speaker/panel programming and the Reuben Awards themselves on NCSFEST.com and COMICARTFESTIVAL.com, which will intermingled with the live-streamed programming of the Lakes Festival taking place simultaneously from Kendall, UK. There is also some events that both the NSC and the Lakes folks will be doing together. Just like last year, the programing will run over a specified time, but individual… READ MORE
August 9th, 2021 | Posted in MAD Magazine
Hold on to your warrants, boys and girls! It’s time for yet another episode of a look back at my twenty years of art for MAD Magazine… DUN DUN! This week we take a look back at MAD‘s spoof of one of the roughly two dozen “Law and Order” spin-offs, “Law and Order” Criminal Intent”, written by MAD‘s Maddest writer Dick Debartolo and first appearing in MAD #449, January 2005. Sadly the pencil roughs for this one are lost, but I do have scans of the inks! Clicky any to embiggen. This was and remains one of my favorite TV parodies I ever did for… READ MORE
August 8th, 2021 | Posted in Mailbag
Q: When not dictated by the script, how do you decide the positioning/gestures of hands? As comics are a visual medium, I’d assume static hands with no play make it a dull panel, but I would also assume too many wacky gestures would distract from the tone. Needless to say, when the focus of a panel is some dialogue without action, where do you draw the line? A: Actually the position/gestures of hands are almost always dictated by the script. Not directly, where the script says “have the speaker waving hands frantically”, but by the dialogue and the emotion the character is supposed to be… READ MORE
August 6th, 2021 | Posted in Stuff from my Studio
It’s time for another enthralling look at some of the stuff in my studio! Today features a couple of awards I was honored with from the International Society of Caricature Artists (aka ISCA, formerly the National Caricaturist’s Network). The ISCA is an organization of professional caricature artists from all over the world. It started in 1989 primarily as a group of live “gig” artists but over the years has grown to encompass any kind of professional caricaturist including illustrators, animators, etc. Every year (at least ones that aren’t in the middle of a global pandemic) the ISCA has a convention/competition where caricaturists from all over… READ MORE
