Tom Bunk (born 17 December 1945) is a lifetime award-winning cartoonist known for adding multiple extraneous details to his posters, cartoons and illustrations created for both American and German publishers.
Early life
Tomas Maria Bunk was born in
Split
Split(s) or The Split may refer to:
Places
* Split, Croatia, the largest coastal city in Croatia
* Split Island, Canada, an island in the Hudson Bay
* Split Island, Falkland Islands
* Split Island, Fiji, better known as Hạfliua
Arts, entertai ...
,
Croatia
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, anthem = "Lijepa naša domovino"("Our Beautiful Homeland")
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, capit ...
, the son of painter and Marianne née Horl. He studied stage design and fine art at the Academy of Arts in
Hamburg
(male), (female) en, Hamburger(s),
Hamburgian(s)
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, Germany.
Career
In 1973, he moved to Berlin, where he began rendering humorous subjects in oil paintings. After selling these paintings in three successful shows, he turned to cartooning and contributed to underground comics in 1976.Bunk, Tom "Artist Profile" spalato.net.
His cartoon creations appeared monthly in the satirical magazine '' Pardon'', other European comic magazines and comic anthologies. After collecting his comics in three books, he moved to New York in 1983 and began drawing for ''
Raw
Raw is an adjective usually describing:
* Raw materials, basic materials from which products are manufactured or made
* Raw food, uncooked food
Raw or RAW may also refer to:
Computing and electronics
* .RAW, a proprietary mass spectrometry dat ...
'', the graphic story magazine edited and published by
Françoise Mouly
Françoise Mouly (; born 24 October 1955) is a Paris-born New York-based designer, editor, and publisher. She is best known as co-founder, co-editor, and publisher of the comics and graphics magazine '' Raw'' (1980–1991), as the publisher of ...
and
Art Spiegelman
Art Spiegelman (; born Itzhak Avraham ben Zeev Spiegelman on February 15, 1948) is an American cartoonist, editor, and comics advocate best known for his graphic novel '' Maus''. His work as co-editor on the comics magazines ''Arcade'' and '' Ra ...
. He drew
Topps
The Topps Company, Inc. is an American company that manufactures chewing gum, candy, and collectibles. Formerly based in New York City, Topps is best known as a leading producer of American football, baseball, basketball, ice hockey, soccer, a ...
trading cards, including
Wacky Packages
''Wacky Packages'' are a series of humorous trading cards featuring parodies of consumer products. The cards were produced by Topps beginning in 1967, first in die-cut, then in peel-and-stick sticker format. There were 16 series produced betwee ...
and
Garbage Pail Kids
''Garbage Pail Kids'' is a series of sticker trading cards produced by the Topps Company, originally released in 1985 and designed to parody the ''Cabbage Patch Kids'' dolls, which were popular at the time.
Each sticker card features a Garbage P ...
. In 1990, he became a regular '' Mad'' cartoonist, and his contributions have led some to regard him as the modern-day replacement at ''Mad'' for
Will Elder
William Elder (born Wolf William Eisenberg; September 22, 1921 – May 15, 2008) was an American illustrator and comic book artist who worked in numerous areas of commercial art but is best known for a frantically funny cartoon style that helped ...
.
He illustrates humorous and surreal oil paintings of strange situations and subjects, explaining, "In my paintings, I am interested in telling a story. I like the story to be open ended and enigmatic. It should have an internal truth, which the viewer will recognize in his/her own way. As elements in my storytelling, I use symbols and their arrangement. I like everyday objects to have a meaning beyond the obvious, a metaphysical meaning. When I paint I try to keep a balance between my intellect, my intuition and my somewhat humouristic approach. In this way I keep the painting always interesting and alive for me. This is also what I would like the painting to be for the viewer, a stimulating and entertaining puzzle."
His list of American clients also includes Burger King,
Carlsen Verlag
Carlsen Verlag is a subsidiary of the homonymous Danish publishing house which in turn belongs to the Swedish media company Bonnier. The branch was founded on 25 April 1953 in Hamburg.
The publisher's program focuses on books for children, i. ...
, Ravensburger Verlag, Semmel Verlach, Volksverlag, Weissmann Verlag and in 2008
Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung
The ''Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung'' (; ''FAZ''; "''Frankfurt General Newspaper''") is a centre-right conservative-liberal and liberal-conservativeHans Magnus Enzensberger: Alter Wein in neuen Schläuchen' (in German). ''Deutschland Radio'', ...
, where he had a daily comic running (''Ein Berliner in New York'') In addition to doing book covers, he also has illustrated children's books, and since 1990, he contributes illustrations and posters for school science books for the "It's About Time" publisher.
For well over a decade, he has contributed to ''Quantum'', a bimonthly science and mathematics magazine for students. These illustrations were exhibited in 2005 at the New York Hall of Science in Queens and collected in a book, ''Quantoons'', published by the National Science Teachers Association in 2006.
Tom Bunk has exhibited his comics and illustrations in Germany. In 2009 he took part in a comic show "Jahrhundert der Comics, die Zeitungs-Strip-Jahre" in Bielefeld and Rehmscheid in 2010 in the Jewish Museum in Berlin, and he exhibited his Quantoons again in 2010 in Frankfurt during the 2015 comicfestival in Munich, Germany.
He continues working mainly for ''Mad'' magazine.
Blogger
A blog (a truncation of "weblog") is a discussion or informational website published on the World Wide Web consisting of discrete, often informal diary-style text entries (posts). Posts are typically displayed in reverse chronological order ...