Monday with Miss Cellany
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Letters to the Editor: Praise and Religion, and The 4th of July; Government Censorship; The Ducktown Weekly; The New York Times For Kids; and more Mafalda.
LoC: Praise for Some and Objections to Religious Comedy
A letter writer to The Daily Hampshire Gazette:
Now, more than ever, when the Gazette arrives each morning, I skip the headlines and go immediately to the cartoon page.
Once there, I go right to Rhymes With Orange, by Hillary Price, which never fails to amuse and amaze me. The depth of her imagination and artistry, along with her ability to come up with a daily masterpiece of wit and wisdom, is truly remarkable.
I hope that her brilliant mind will continue to come up with such treasures for many years to come. She is truly one of the greats.
Writer Barbara apparently doesn’t notice that Rina Piccolo co-sign on every Rhymes With Orange.
In another newspaper on a different comic:
In his May 24 Free for All letter, “Slathered with blather,” Lewis Gollub asked The Post to replace “WuMo” with a better comic strip. I concur.
The Eucharist (Sacred Host) is the pinnacle of the Catholic faith. Catholics believe they are truly receiving Jesus: body, blood, soul and divinity. Communion is part of the worship service at other Christian churches, too. It is never okay to make fun of someone’s faith. The May 19 “WuMo” was very hurtful to Catholics and other Christians, especially during this joyous time of a new pope.
Looks like The Eucharist is off-limits as a subject for cartoons. Communion is not a fit subject for cartoonists.
Is The Reverend Mike Morgan taking a shot at Trump in Today’s For Heaven’s Sake in such a way he can innocently defend it as only a 4th of July comic strip and that readers are misinterpreting his intentions?
Government Censorship
In China there is actual government censorship:
Comics journalist Joe Sacco’s next book, The Once and Future Riot, was supposed to hit bookstore shelves in September, but it’s running about a month late. Publication scheduling delays are neither ideal nor uncommon—but the holdup on Sacco’s latest, which PW’s starred review called a “meticulous and beautifully crafted account of religious and territorial strife” in Western Uttar Pradesh, India, wasn’t due to any routine issue.
“We were going to print it in China,” Carolyn O’Keefe, director of publicity for nonfiction at Henry Holt’s Metropolitan imprint, told PW. “But they objected to maps that depicted borders in ways they didn’t like.” This isn’t the first time Metropolitan has dealt with this particular problem. In 2021, its planned printing partner in China requested changes to Elise Engler’s A Diary of the Plague Year: An Illustrated Chronicle of 2020 before agreeing to take on the book. After Engler rejected the request, Holt produced the book domestically, postponing its release until early 2022.
Dean Simons for Publishers Weekly reports on the problems of printing books in China.
Eric Reynolds, VP and associate publisher at Fantagraphics, estimates that 30%–40% of the Seattle-based company’s titles are printed in China. Running into issues at the printer, he said, is not uncommon. But, he added, it’s not really the printers that are causing the problem. It’s the bureaucracy: namely, the Chinese government’s General Administration of Press and Publication.
“Every printer in China must submit everything through GAPP,” Reynolds said. “Printers run work through GAPP as a matter of course, then come back to us and say, ‘We can’t do it; it was rejected.’ ”
The Ducktown Weekly
The Ducktown Weekly provides a full week’s worth of the best comics, puzzles, and features, on paper, delivered to your door. Evey week we mail a 16-page issue: comics like Peanuts, Big Nate, and the Family Circus; the LA Times crossword; insight into the nation’s birds, parks, history, and more.
Subscribe to the Ducktown Weekly for $16.95 per month (month-to-month), $99.95 for six months, or $189.95 for one year.
From $3.65 to $4.23 per issue depending on the subscription choice it sounds a bit pricey (what’s the cartoonists’ take?) even for a color publication, and we don’t know the exact contents, but I like the idea (it’s been done before); and what the hey, you can check it out for free!
Click here to request a FREE COPY – no strings attached.
Bill Mayer cover for The New York Times For Kids
Bill Mayer again stars as artist for the most recent The New York Times For Kids edition.
Más Mafalda
More praise, this time from Daniel Alarcón and The New Yorker for the new English printing of Mafalda:
I probably first saw this image in the nineteen-eighties—taped to the wall of a cousin’s bedroom in Lima, perhaps, or hanging on the side of a newspaper kiosk—but I already knew who the little girl was. In fact, I can’t recall a time in my life when I didn’t know her. “Mafalda,” the comic strip in which she appeared, was published in Argentina from 1964 to 1973, and remained a cultural touchstone for Latin Americans of every generation thereafter. At one point, Mafalda and Eva Perón were the two most recognizable Argentinean women worldwide. “Mafalda” has been translated into more than twenty-five languages, and tens of millions of books have been sold in Spanish alone, making it the best-selling Latin American comic of all time.
The strip—and, even more so, the eponymous character—stood for something…
Read the Quino biography and Mafaldo review at The New Yorker. Or here.
Seriously, I’m gonna hafta get that book.
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