Tom Bunk

Who is Tom Bunk?

Tom Bunk is a cartoonist known for adding multiple extraneous details to his posters, cartoons and illustrations created for both American and German publishers.

Born Tomas Maria Bunk in Split, Croatia, he studied stage design and fine art at the Academy of Arts in Hamburg, Germany. 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.

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, the graphic story magazine edited and published by Françoise Mouly and Art Spiegelman. He drew Topps trading cards, including Wacky Packages and Garbage Pail Kids. In 1993, 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.

He continues to do humorous and surreal oil paintings of strange situations and subjects, as he notes:

His list of American clients also includes Burger King, Byron Preiss, Silly Productions, Springer International, It's About Time and Unicef. His clients in Germany: Carlsen Verlag, Ravensburger Verlag, Semmel Verlach, Volksverlag, Weissmann Verlag and in 2008 Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, where he had a daily comic running 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.