Historical looks at The Ungentlemanly Art from the past week.Illustrating Propaganda During World War I If the echoes of fascism have brought the 1930s and ‘40s troublingly to mind, it’s worth recalling that modern propaganda became a global enterprise during the First World War, rather than the second. For the US, that conflict was brief, […]
Clay Jones (Ind) strikes the right note on the ridiculous question of whether people deserve the titles they’ve earned.Spoiler: Yes.Plenty of people have noted that the term “dottore” was applied to educators before it was applied to physicians. For that matter, it was applied to educators before there was such a thing as a Phd […]
Darrin Bell goes back almost 30 years to his old Cal Berkeley rootswith a special comic strip that takes us back nearly 2,000 years. Apparently an excerpt from a Stan Kelly cartoon has become a popular meme. Kelly has a very black-and-white view of the world. The color black, if you look through the cartoons, is […]
Below are some comic strip and cartoon books scheduled for December 2020 release. Images and links (mostly) via Amazon, though ordering through your local comic or independent book store is a good idea. Invisible Men: The Trailblazing Black Artists of Comic Books – review Barnaby Volume Four Max and the Midknights: Battle of the Bodkins […]
A roundup of recent news items.Tomversation, Humor for a Sheltered World© Tom FalcoThe Miami Herald highlights Tom Falco‘s contribution to making the pandemic a bit more bearable. When the pandemic started, Tom Falco got back to drawing comics. On May 4, he began publishing them online through “Tomversation,” which he subtitled “The real world. Just […]
I realize it’s a case of “damning with faint praise,” but Mike Luckovich (AJC) offers the best of a bunch of happy cartoons praising the rollout of the Covid vaccine, which is a demonstration of Tolstoy’s opening of Anna Karenina that “All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.”That’s […]
Desirée N. Santos has earned the Girl Scouts Gold Award for her Emma webcomic.The Gold Award is the highest achievement within the Girl Scouts of the USA. From NJ Advance Media: Desirée N. Santos, a resident of Cranford and a Lifetime member of the Girl Scouts of Cranford (Service Unit 48), recently received official approval […]
Sports cartoonist Pierre “Peb” Bellocq has been honored by the racing world.From the Daily Racing Form:Pierre “Peb” Bellocq, the most famous racing caricaturist of all time, [has] been selected for inclusion in the National Museum of Racing’s Joe Hirsch Media Roll of Honor, the Saratoga Springs museum announced on Monday. Bellocq, who has been known […]
I like Walt Handelsman (Times-Picayune)‘s cartoon, and I enjoyed the celebratory posts on social media yesterday as the electoral votes came in from the various states, sealing the Biden victory and spelling an end to . . .Well, an end to what?Along with confirmation of the election results came news that Bill Barr has decided […]
The New Yorker‘s assistant cartoon editor Colin Stokes checked Instagram to see which cartoons from the magazine during the year 2020 got the most “likes” and shares the 26 most popular.Of course it is too soon to know if any of them will join the few other New Yorker cartoons with their own Wikipedia entries.cartoons […]
Reply All (WPWG) speaks for me, though even in a virus-free world, I wouldn’t have to go through all that. It’s one of the chief benefits of retirement.I knew I had settled into my middle-management niche when I grasped the proper way to handle the holiday party: Show up, get one drink, eat some hors […]
Famed animator Bill Plympton has three days to raise $40,000 for his independent animated feature. As a kid growing up among the tall timbers of Oregon, I wanted to create a Western that takes place in the evergreen-covered mountains. It’s 50 years later, I’ve had Oscar nominations and won Cannes Festival awards, and it’s time […]
Tom Richmond Answers Your MAD QuestionsThe word spread last year that MAD magazine would no longer publish. We here even contributed to that idea by reporting what others, some knowledgeable, were saying. Former MAD contributor Tom Richmond responds to that and other questions about MAD magazine.Claim: MAD stopped publishing years ago/last year/recently. Verdict: FALSE MAD […]
Yeah, let’s start with Flash Gordon flashing forward to his skivvies. © King Features SyndicateBased on the August 26, 1934 paper doll by Alex Raymond. Fun and Games When I saw these this morning I thought, “That art is outside the norm for these strips.” (Well, that last one not so much.) But can you […]
Michael de Adder (Lincoln Project) provides a ridiculous look at a ridiculous effort, and he’s not the first cartoonist to invoke the “clown car” analogy in the current storm of preposterous appeals against mathematics, logic and law.But I like his use of state flags, because, while the drawing itself is silly, what isn’t funny is […]