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Weekend Whatnots

A bevy of New Yorker cartoonists turned out for the launch of Alen McWeeney and Michael Maslin’s new book At Wit’s End: Cartoonists of The New Yorker. And what better way to celebrate a book of photographs and profiles than with a collection of photos taken at the event by way of Michael Maslin’s Ink Spill.

photo: David Kenet

2024 marks the sesquicentennial of Winston Churchill’s birth on November 30, 1874 and the cartoon media is joining in the celebrations. Tim Benson’s book Churchill: A Life in Cartoons (“more than 300 cartoons, most of which have not been utilised in previously published books”) was released earlier this year.

Now closer to the date of his birth the Imperial War Museums London branch is setting up a three month (free) exhibit: Churchill in Cartoons: Satirising a Statesman. The exhibit displays cartoons from friends and foes, foreign and domestic. As The Guardian preview shows it is not just Churchill’s World War II years as the leader of Great Britain but also his time as a leader of a commonwealth of nations. And the foreign cartoons are not particularly kind to the statesman.

Comic strip comic books have a market. CBR reports that the five issue Flash Gordon series was popular enough that Mad Cave Studios are continuing the title with another story arc #6-10. That same comic book company also published a Dick Tracy series, they are re-issuing those comic books in “Encore” editions with new covers featuring villains as portrayed by Dave Johnson. The Phantom Coloring Book will supposedly (it’s Hermes Press after all) be available next month. If I’m reading the early details correctly it will feature selected comic strip panels by Ray Moore, Wilson McCoy, and Sy Barry but redrawn for coloring book pages by Samantha Lomuscio.

A restoration project involving the first(?) comic strip and the museum dedicated to it is planned for next couple of years. The Bayeux Tapestry has been called a very early example of sequential narrative art, it has also been referred to as the first comic strip. The 70 meter long embroidery consists of 58 scenes depicting the Norman conquest of England. ActuaLitté has details of the project and the “comic strip.”

The London newspaper The Guardian is being accused of employing anti-semites and its editor is said to lack the courage to face the problem. The Guardian in the past has had to deal with similar controversies over cartoons it has published and even cartoons it hasn’t published.

Apparently we at The Daily Cartoonist aren’t the only ones or even the first ones to publish typos or state things in such a jumbled way as to be undecipherable. Redscraper from Who’s Out There excerpts portions of Can It Be True? (“It must be true – it was in all the newspapers”) a 1950s book collection on newspaper misprints and garbled syntax. Illustrated by Beryl Antonia Botterill Yeoman (aka Anton).

feature image photo by Florence Buchanan



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