Tom's Mad Blog
March 22nd, 2021 | Posted in MAD Magazine
We continue the agonizingly slow chronological crawl through my MAD work with a look at my 18th job for the magazine, a movie parody of the second “Harry Potter” film, written by my CLAPTRAP cohort Desmond Devlin. that appeared in MAD #424, Dec 2002. I remember this job being a pretty big deal for me, because we in the Richmond household were big fans of the Harry Potter books. We used to read them to the kids when we put them to bed each night, and then we’d go downstairs and keep reading them. So, when I got the call to do this movie spoof… READ MORE
March 21st, 2021 | Posted in Mailbag
Q: What do you think of courtroom sketches? Here in the UK, artists are not allowed to draw in the courtroom, and must draw from memory. Could you render a scene from memory, quickly, and with recognisable likenesses? How would you approach the task, if you were required to do it? A: I have no familiarity or experience with courtroom sketching. I know a couple of artists who do it as a side gig, but they are allowed to draw in the courtroom as the proceedings take place. I don’t know of anyone who does it as you describe, having to work from memory after leaving… READ MORE
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
