Miss Cellany Clears the Queue
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Steve Sack returns to the drawing board, KAL shows how he creates and provides a flow chart, Pulitzer Prize-winning graphic novelist Tessa Hulls is interviewed, Freebies: Comics Research Bibliography and Addenda and The Blue Road to Trump Hell, American Library’s list of Youth Media Awards (the Newbery, the Caldecott, the Alex for Peter Kuper, and more).
Steve Sack Unretires
Minneapolis Star-Tribune editorial cartoonist Steve Sack retired nearly four years ago. But the abuses the federal government has been inflicting on his hometown has brought him back to the drawing board.
He is posting new cartoons at the Cagle Cartoons site.
The Magic of KAL
Kevin Kallaugher, better known as KAL, diagrams two cartoons. One is a multipanel cartoon from idea to fruition and the other about drawing the reader through the sequence of reading a one panel cartoon.
By the way: You who may be in London Monkton, Maryland during the next month check out Kal’s exhibit.
One Pulitzer Prize-Winning Graphic Novel is Enough
Only two graphic memoirs in history have ever been awarded the Pulitzer Prize, Feeding Ghosts [link added], and Art Spiegelman’s Maus—the story of his father’s memories of the Holocaust—that was awarded in 1992. In both books, the extraordinary blend of innovative artwork and vivid storytelling made global turmoil from the past come to life in new ways through the eyes of the children and grandchildren of those who experienced those horrors firsthand.
At The Comics Journal Emily Rems interviews Tessa Hulls on creating Feeding Ghosts: A Graphic Memoir.
Talk me through your art-making process for Feeding Ghosts.
Oh God, I don’t even know where to start with that question except to provide myself as a cautionary tale and say: don’t do what I did!
I never scripted, thumbnailed, or penciled. Instead, I first wrote the whole book as a 10,000-word creative nonfiction essay, where the epigraphs that start each section served as the anchor points of the structure. I then used Scrivener to break apart that essay so I knew approximately how much content I would try to put on each page. (Literally: there would be three pages where it would just say “Explain Cultural Revolution in three pages—here, here, and here.”)I then printed that file into a three-ring binder and would flip through it until I came across a page I maybe knew how to turn into a comics format, and would then go straight to final inking, sometimes not even knowing what all the panels would contain. I therefore, drew the entire book simultaneously until it came into focus as a whole.
The Comics Research Bibliography and Addenda free online
The 30th Anniversary edition of Comics Research Bibliography and Addenda is now available online – for free!
From Mike Rhode and Comics DC:
The CRB is a worldwide bibliography of all types of comic art, including comic books, comic strips, caricature, gag cartoons, animation, editorial cartoons, biography, webcomics, political cartoons, history of cartooning, and comics scholarship.
Our 30th Anniversary Edition has been updated with 3,327 new entries. It’s downloadable at https://archive.org/details/crb-2025-ebook and there will be print edition in the coming month.An addenda of 2000 more pages of unsorted citations is at https://archive.org/details/crb-2025-addendum These citations have been formatted but not yet placed into the CRB. Many of them are from the first online iteration of the CRB, now preserved on the Internet Archive. For our 30th Anniversary and in honor of John Lent’s 90th birth year, we are providing these as a resource the first time, since they are searchable by keyword. However, the goal remains to empty this document by placing all the citations into the main bibliography which is online now at Comics Research Bibliography.
Comics Research Bibliography 2025 & Addenda combined e-book edition is now online as well.
Newbery, Caldecott, Alex and More Book Awards
The American Library Association has released the list of 2026 Youth Media Award Winners.
From the American Library Magazine: A complete list of the 2026 award winners.
John Newbery Medal for the most outstanding contribution to children’s literature:
All the Blues in the Sky, written by Renée Watson, is the 2026 Newbery Medal winner. The book is published by Bloomsbury Children’s Books, an imprint of Bloomsbury Publishing.
Randolph Caldecott Medal for the most distinguished American picture book for children:
Fireworks, illustrated by Cátia Chien, is the 2026 Caldecott Medal winner. The book is written by Matthew Burgess and published by Clarion Books, an imprint of HarperCollins Publishers.
Let make a note that Insectopolis by Peter Kuper took an Alex Award for one of the 10 best “adult books that appeal to teen audiences.”
A New Political Book For Adults
The Blue Road to Trump Hell by Norman Solomon has been released and can be read for free.
“This book scrutinizes how the behavior of many Democrats assisted Trump’s electoral triumphs. That scrutiny is important not only for clarity about the past. It also makes possible a focus on ways that such failures can be avoided in the future.”
It is mentioned here because:
The book includes eleven full-color cartoons by Matt Wuerker, who has been Politico’s editorial cartoonist and illustrator ever since its 2007 launch. In 2012, Wuerker won the Pulitzer Prize for editorial cartooning.
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