Tom's Mad Blog
December 3rd, 2020 | Posted in Illustration Throwback Thursday
Back in 2016 I was a guest at the New Delhi Comic Con in Okhla, South New Delhi. I spent three days at the con signing stuff, doing drawings and made a presentation on Sunday. I did the above illustration as a Delhi Comic Con exclusive for the show. It’s an imaginary MAD cover featuring Alfred as the title character from the Bollywood film “Enthiran” (“Robot” in English) starring a well-known and loved actor in India, Rajinikanth. If you’ve never seen the movie “Enthiran”, it’s got some crazy special effects that will blow you away. READ MORE
December 2nd, 2020 | Posted in Daily Coronacature
Here’s my caricature of Ray Liotta as “Henry Hill” from the movie “Goodfellas”. This is an example of a caricature where the exaggerations are based more on the expression than the actual features. Ray Liotta actually has a very small mouth and quite round eyes with long, dark eyelashes. However the point of this caricature is to capture the insanely over-the-top laughing his Henry Hill character does in the famous “Do I amuse you?” scene from Goodfellas. That means exaggerating the mouth and its crazy shape, the smaller, squinted eyes, and the body language. Extreme expressions like this means it can compromise the likeness. If… READ MORE
December 1st, 2020 | Posted in MAD Magazine
This week MAD artist Dalton Vaughn posted this interesting tidbit on a couple of MAD Facebook groups: I also had a conversation about a year or so ago with Mike about this very thing. At the time he was just considering what kind of a market might be available for a MAD-like humor magazine now that MAD was moving to reprinted content. BTW, if you are not familiar with The American Bystander, it’s a humor publication very unlike MAD both in tone and format. It’s kind of like a satirical New Yorker. It’s mostly text articles, but it does have a fair amount of cartoons… READ MORE
November 30th, 2020 | Posted in MAD Magazine
Each Monday I’m doing an installment of a complete, chronological look at every job I did for MAD over my 20 year run for the magazine, complete with whatever stories, anecdotes or milestones might apply and the full article. This week is a look at my second appearance in the magazine, in a feature called “The Untold History of MAD Magazine”, written by my CLAPTRAP co-hort, Desmond Devlin for MAD #400, December 2000. MAD #400 was obviously a major milestone for the magazine. The issue was packed with special stuff, including a feature called “What Drives You MAD?” which contained actual responses to that question… READ MORE
November 29th, 2020 | Posted in Mailbag
Q: I think it’s safe to say that caricature is a central part of your illustration career. What caused you to chose that as a focus? A: I sort of stumbled into it actually. Caricature was something I never really consciously tried to do until I got a summer job drawing caricatures at a theme park after my first year of college. It was during that summer of 1985 that I really fell in love with the art form. It’s not like I hadn’t done it before. I just didn’t really connect the term “caricature” with what I did. I drew funny pictures of my… READ MORE
November 28th, 2020 | Posted in General
I get a lot of people who tell me on Facebook or Twitter or wherever that they didn’t hear about this workshop that just happened close to them, or that Holiday Caricature Commission offer/virtual comic con, or whatever else until it was sold out, and wished they had as they would have liked to participate or get one. It seems some folks only occasionally visit the intensely riveting and regularly updated “Tom’s Mad Blog” rather than visit every day twice a day. Who knew?? Okay, 99% of my posts are time wasting stuff, but sometimes I do announce something you might actually want to hear… READ MORE
November 27th, 2020 | Posted in General
When MAD announced last year that they were not going to be doing any more movie or TV parodies, I immediately pulled any original MAD pages I had for sale in the Studio Store. I haven’t offered any for sale since, because neither I nor they are making them anymore. I figured I’d better hang on to any I had left, which isn’t a huge number as many have sold over the years. However for Black Friday this year I am listing a limited number of older pages at close to half the price I usually charge ($175 instead of $300). I’m listing them because…… READ MORE
November 26th, 2020 | Posted in General
Happy Thanksgiving, America! This is a hard one. I hope you all have a wonderful but small and safe Thanksgiving. READ MORE
