Tom's Mad Blog
January 15th, 2021 | Posted in General
In the last 8 months or so I have been doing a surprising number of private and corporate commissions that call for original art as opposed to digital. While I can hem and haw my way through a painting like that reasonably well, it has been so long since I did a lot of traditional art jobs I felt like I needed a refresher course in working in watercolor. So, I looked up a former instructor from my art college days who I knew lived in my area, and asked if he was interested in spending a couple of hours working with me on my… READ MORE
January 14th, 2021 | Posted in General
I had a nice surprise is the mail yesterday. My plaque for winning the National Cartoonists Society Divisional award, aka the “Silver Reuben” for “Best in Magazine/Newspaper Illustration” for 2019 arrived on my doorstep, and was not stolen by porch pirates. Yes, this is 2021 and this was for 2019, but the mail is slow during a pandemic! Actually as there was no in-person NCS Reuben Award Weekend this year, the awards and speaking program were done virtually back in September as part of NCSFest, so it hasn’t been all that long since the awards were announced (BTW if you want to see any of… READ MORE
January 13th, 2021 | Posted in Daily Coronacature
Here’s my André the Giant as “Fezzik” from the fan-favorite movie “The Princess Bride”. How do I know it’s a “Fan-favorite”? Because it’s one of the three movies our backers picked for us to do parodies of in CLAPTRAP! This is another example of the kind of sketches I’ll be doing in copies of CLAPTRAP for all “Schmendrick” or higher backers. You get to choose the movie the character I draw comes from (I choose the subject)! There was a limit of 100 of these, and there are only 15 left! Grab one while you can. Or you can just buy this original… READ MORE
January 12th, 2021 | Posted in General
Back in the 90’s I owned several caricature operations at some tourist-centric shopping and entertainment venues around the country. I had operations at Underground Atlanta in Atlanta GA, Union Station in St. Louis, MO, and Mall of America here in Minnesota (the mall part, nit in what was then “Camp Snoopy” theme park). I was always trying to figure out ways to make the displays more dynamic and eye catching. One way I thought would be great was to add a video element to the display. This was 1993, well before anybody with a laptop, a smartphone camera, and basic editing software, could put together… READ MORE
January 11th, 2021 | Posted in MAD Magazine
We continue our Monday MADness chronological crawl through my work for MAD with a look at my eighth appearance in the magazine, a parody of the 2001 film “Lara Croft: Tomb Raider” subtly titled “Lotta Crotch: Bazoom Raider”, written by Desmond Devlin and appearing in MAD #410, Oct 2001. This movie was of course based on the popular video game, and starred a young Angelina Jolie in the title role. Her casting was criticized by video game fanboys mainly because they didn’t think she had big enough breasts to play the famously chesty Lara Croft. That is, of course, ridiculous considering this was a fictional… READ MORE
January 10th, 2021 | Posted in Mailbag
Q: I love the movies you’ve chosen for your Claptrap book. I know your supporters got to choose a few, but I’m just curious what your thinking was behind your choices? A: When MAD writer Desmond Devlin and I decided to do CLAPTRAP, we were thinking we would do a mix of classic/cult classic movies and new releases. We were going to do about a 50-50 split between older and new films. Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker was always the first one we were going to do because we wanted to complete the MAD parody series of all the Star Wars films. We figured… READ MORE
January 8th, 2021 | Posted in General
So many people liked the MAD cover commission I posted yesterday I thought I’d share another one I did for that same virtual NYCC event last October. Fans of the Twilight Zone will get the gag. READ MORE
January 7th, 2021 | Posted in General
Back on the last weekend of February I was sitting at my artist’s alley table at C2E2 in Chicago, listening to people discuss this new virus that was raging through China and speculating if it would affect us in any way here in the US. Oh, what innocent little lambs we were. Little did I know that was the last time I’d be at a comic con, or any other gathering of more than about 20 people, for the rest of 2020. We take so many things for granted in life, and it isn’t until we lose something that we realize it. With the advent… READ MORE
