Cartoonnews for Pros & Fans
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Running the Gamut: Comic Stripping (Wannabe)! Editooning (Jack Ohman)! Magazine Cartooning (Liza Donnelly)! Comic Booking (Donut Squad)! Animating (Legal Rights Reverting)! More Comic Stripping (Dogs of C-Kennel)!
Wannabe by Luca Debus Enters The Kingdom
A few people relayed the new to me news to me that the Wannabe comic strip by Luca Debus has signed onto the Comics Kingdom site. Not the least of them Alex Garcia at Comics Kingdom itself:
Big news from the Kingdom: there’s a new comic in town! Starting today, November 10, 2025, Wannabe joins the Comics Kingdom lineup — a fresh, funny, and delightfully offbeat strip from cartoonist Luca De Bus.
At its heart, Wannabe is a daily celebration of ambition, imperfection, and the wonderfully human urge to be just a little bit better (or at least look like it). Each strip follows everyday characters as they chase dreams big and small — from self-improvement to sheer survival — all with a wink, a grin, and plenty of heart.
Some of you may remember Wannabe’s year and a half run at Gocomics from 2024- earlier this year.
Luca provides answers to some now frequently asked questions:
Go to your Comics Kingdom dashboard and add Wannabe to your favorites page.
The Annotated Jack Ohman
Every week editorial cartoonist Jack Ohman talks about the choices he made and the reasons he had in developing his “illustrated commentary.” I found today’s especially interesting and enlightening (no shade on previous “This Week in Cartoons” installments).
It probably comes as not a surprise to people who follow my work that I seem to enjoy drawing airplanes. The dirty little non-secret of American political cartooning is that most male cartoonists got their start drawing war scenes in elementary school: tanks, airplanes, rockets, bombs, and airplanes. If I had a little more initiative tonight, I’d go find a few of those drawings and post them—but this could be an entire new column, so I’ll do that and you’ll see them.
Generally speaking, if you said the name of a World War II airplane, I could probably do fairly decent job of drawing it from memory.
The past week saw Jack draw Airplanes and Airports (for his weekly Shmerconish cartoon), Dick Cheney at The Pearly Gates (and discusses editooning’s Pearly Gates-Shame), caricaturing Nora O’Donnell and her Trump interview (and talks about her CBS predecessors: Murrow, Cronkite, Rather), a California Round-up (Jack does a weekly cartoon and column for The San Francisco Chronicle), and how his “SNAP” cartoon changed (originally not an Eagle, settling on the “X” classic cartoon eye, and more).
If this sort of thing interests you, I find it fascinating, check out your favorite cartoonist they may be doing it.
Funny Women Woman of The New Yorker
New Yorker cartoonist and New Yorker cartoon historian (herstorian?) Liza Donnelly sat down with new York City radio host Brian Lehrer on WNYC.
Liza Donnelly, writer and cartoonist at The New Yorker and the author of Very Funny Ladies: The New Yorker’s Women Cartoonists, 1925-2021 (Prometheus, 2022) and the substack “Seeing Things,” [link added] discusses the short documentary film she directed, “Women Laughing,” [link added] about cartoonists at The New Yorker and their artistic processes.
Brian Lehrer and WNYC provide a transcript of the 15 minute interview for us readers.
My idea initially was to have it be about the creative process. I wanted to talk with my colleagues one-on-one. That’s how we started. The film has sections where it’s one-on-one, talking with them and drawing with them.
We’re sitting across from each other, there’s a big piece of paper in front of us, and we’re just drawing and doodling and talking about why we do this crazy thing, and what’s it like to be a woman in this business, does it make any difference? Then I thought, “We should have everybody come together,” and we got access to The Algonquin Hotel. Thanks very much to The Algonquin Hotel. They were very generous in giving us space and a roundtable. Ten of us sat around the roundtable and did the same thing, talking and laughing and teasing each other and drinking wine and drawing. This movie, Brian, is a lot of fun, and it’s joyful, but it also has some serious elements to it.
Comic Books Aren’t Just For Adults Anymore
There once was a time, dear reader, when comic books weren’t all sturm und drang und ubermensch.
Andy Oliver at Broken Frontier interviews comic book creator Neill Cameron.
Neill Cameron’s Donut Squad has become one of the absolute highlights of UK kids weekly comic The Phoenix in recent months. I described it here at Broken Frontier as “a frantic, mischievous, form-pushing delight” when I reviewed its first outing in book form over the summer. Cameron is also responsible for long-running The Phoenix mainstay Mega Robo Bros (“Alex and Freddy are two normal bickering brothers – who also happen to be super-powered robots!”)…
AO: What was the genesis of Donut Squad? How did the idea for the multiple strips evolve and change as you began devising the characters and situations?
CAMERON: I wish I had a better anecdote for the genesis of it, but one day the basic idea for the strip, the kind of tone and vibe of it, just popped into my head and I made myself laugh…
There’s a lot of value to repetition with this kind of thing; kids (and indeed adults) love to see the thing they already know and love, so it’s then a constant game of giving them that but also playing around and messing with those expectations… Like, kids know that if it’s a Jammyboi strip, then Jammyboi is going to turn up at the end and get jam on things. But what if he doesn’t ? What happens then? What happens to a gag strip if the punchline never arrives? How long can you hold off that moment of release, and what ridiculous lengths can you take the story to in trying to avoid it? I think these kind of things can be very fun.
By the way: Neill Cameron’s ‘Donut Squad: Take Over the World’ is among 15 books to be shortlisted for the Waterstones Book of the Year 2025 award.
Roger Rabbit Censored No More
The rights to Roger Rabbit, Jessica Rabbit and Toontown have reverted back to creator Gary K. Wolf!
From ImNotBad:
It’s official! Ownership of Roger Rabbit is successfully back in the hands of creator Gary K. Wolf.
“I now have back the rights to all my characters, all my books. I can, basically, do my own Roger Rabbit projects.”
This information was shared exclusively with ImNotBad.com and Jessica Rabbit World in a recent interview. The ownership of Roger Rabbit and other beloved characters has successfully transferred back to its originator, author Gary K. Wolf.
Regaining these rights was made possible through the 35-Year Copyright Reversion Clause. This clause was designed to give original creators (such as songwriters and authors) the ability to reclaim rights to their original work after a period of 35 years.
This 35-Year Copyright Reversion law is news to me.
Under U.S. copyright law, any transfer or license of copyright can be terminated 35 years after the transfer or license was made or, in some cases, 35 years after the work was published, so long as the work was not made for hire.
The details of this provision are complicated. The Termination of Transfer Tool from Authors Alliance and Creative Commons is designed to help users determine whether these statutory termination rights apply to any of their works. Their Frequently Asked Questions page provides more information about how this law works.
One Particular Veterans’ Day Comic Strip
There were, surprisingly to me, many Veterans’ Day strips today. A few were heartwarming.
One of those few affected Sean Kleefeld who devoted his daily column to it:
It’s Veterans’ Day here in the US, and I was going to do a post today rounding up all the comic strips I could find that referenced it. But one of the first ones I came across — indeed THE first one I came across — was Dogs of C-Kennel by Mick and Mason Mastroianni…
You can determine most organizations’ priorities by their spending. And while it varies from year to year and service to service, the smallest line items in US military budgets tend to be housing and health care. That there are 30,000 homeless veterans in the US is a tragedy in every sense. But I think, most tellingly, it highlights the imbalance between the nobility of people who volunteer to be part of the military and the ignobility of those ostensbily tasked with ensuring they’re being taken care of.
Cartoonews was a very well regarded fan/prozine from Jim Ivey.
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