Miss Cellany Riding Along on a Cartoonists’ Carousel
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The Berndt Toast Gang gathers; Tom Bone exhibit; Chris Ware stamps; New Yorker cartoonists Substacks; David Levine remembered; Kevin KAL Kallaugher coasters; and Jim Davis’ anatomy class.
Berndt Toast
It’s the last Thursday of the month, and as it has for more than 50 years, one of Long Island’s more exclusive clubs is meeting.
Some of the nation’s best-known cartoonists are members of the Long Island Chapter of the National Cartoonists Society, uniting monthly for camaraderie, conversation, connection, commiseration, and, in recent years, a little Chinese food at Albert’s Mandarin Gourmet in Huntington.
Claude Solnik for Newsday covered the last month’s meeting of Long Island cartoonists. (Or here.)
A long list of greats lived on Long Island and belonged to the Long Island group, such as Mort Drucker (Mad magazine); Stan Goldberg (Archie Comics); Joe Giella (Batman comics); John Romita Sr. (The Amazing Spider-Man, Wolverine and The Punisher); Bill Kresse (the Daily News); Bill Hoest (The Lockhorns creator); Don Orehek, (The Saturday Evening Post and Cracked), as well as Pulitzer Prize-winner Jules Feiffer.
Can you identify the cartoonists in the above photo by the Andy Eng caricatures from the June 2025 meeting?
To The Bone
BLUEFIELD – Nearly 50 images representing almost 30 years of cartoon commentary about local politics and local issues plus cartoons featuring arm wrestling between winter and spring as well as baby Moses parting his bathwater now have a special exposition.
Drawing Conclusions: 30 years of Editorial Cartoons by T Bone [link added] opened this week at the Bea Paine Gallery in downtown Bluefield. It’s a retrospective featuring the work of Tom Bone, an award-winning cartoonist whose work has appeared for decades in the Bluefield Daily Telegraph and the Princeton Times.
Greg Jordan of The Bluefield Daily Telegraph covered the opening of the Tom Bone exhibit. (Or here.)
“When you’re doing a show, you know you can’t print 1,500 cartoons on the walls,” he said. “And so I made some difficult decisions because many of these cartoons I have an attachment to for one reason or another. Ultimately, you think about what the audience in Bluefield or other locations respond to, react to. In some cases you look at it and say this is a nice composition or this was a great statement to be made about an important topic, and so that has to be in the show.”
Stamped Forever Ware
Esteemed cartoonist Chris Ware is known for his detailed New Yorker covers and his complex graphic novels featuring his characters like Jimmy Corrigan and Rusty Brown. But now, Ware’s work — featuring architectural details familiar to most Chicago-area residents — is going micro.
The 57-year-old Riverside resident has created a new sheet of 20 postage stamps, which will roll out on July 23 and help to mark the U.S. Postal Service’s 250th birthday.
Courtney Kueppers and WBEZ Chicago cover Chris Ware putting his stamp on the U.S. post office.
“I tried to organize them like little tiny New Yorker covers that have their gags,” Ware said. “That’s cartoonist parlance for having meaning.”
“It’s sort of like a comic strip page. But in a comic, you’re used to seeing very clear demarcations of space with panels, and with this, it’s a little bit invisible, so I wanted to take advantage of that. The second you peel the stamp off, it suddenly would have a meaning to it.”
NYer Cartoonists Stacked
Michael Maslin, himself a New Yorker cartoonist, has a current list of Substacks by New Yorker cartoonists.
We will have to check it against The Daily Cartoonist’s own Substack list.
A Master Caricaturist
For years, I had wanted to connect with David Levine. If you’re not a cartoonist, an art enthusiast, or someone who’s flipped through The New York Review of Books, you might not know who he was—or why an artist from Brooklyn could matter so much to someone like me. But David Levine wasn’t just a master caricaturist. He was a soul-reader with a pen, a Freud with the line work of an 18th-century draftsman. His crosshatches could strip a politician bare—without ever drawing blood.
On Nik’s Substack cartoonist Nik Kowsar remembers meeting David Levine, a master of caricature.
David Levine gave me the courage to become who I am. His work taught me how to stand tall in the face of power—and to aim my pen like a scalpel at the liars, the cowards, and the enemies of truth. For that, I owe him more than thanks.
KAL Coasters
One of my favorite freelance jobs of my long career has been my partnership with the famed Hay-Adams Hotel. Located adjacent to the White House, The Hay-Adams is a Washington institution noted for its first class amenities and attentive service.
One of its notable assets is its basement bar. As it is often frequented by Washington power players, it is aptly called Off The Record.
A distinguishing characteristic of Off The Record is that the room is festooned with cartoon caricatures of prominent political leaders.
Kevin (KAL) Kallaugher teases us with some art for a Washington D.C. bar with the promise of more to come.
Our teamwork with the Hay-Adams expanded when we were commissioned to create coasters for the bar. Each coaster would feature an important politician drinking in Off The Record. At the start, there were a handful of coaster options available. But over time new coaster characters have been rotated in and others rotated out. Over time, our cartoon trio [KAL, Matt Wuerker, Ann Telnaes] has created 50 different versions.
The Onion Reveals Previously Unknown Jim Davis Factoid
ALBANY, IN—Explaining that true artistry requires obsessiveness and a scientific understanding of form, cartoonist Jim Davis revealed Friday that he studied the musculature of medical cadavers in order to properly draw the character Jon in his syndicated comic strip. “Before I drew a single panel of Garfield, I spent months meticulously examining corpses so that I could make Jon as lifelike as possible,” said Davis, who estimated that he dissected over 30 bodies in his quest to understand how muscles, ligaments, and tendons work beneath the skin.
While comic artists are known to study human anatomy to further their talents The Onion says Garfield creator Jim Davis took a more extreme route.
Davis added that he drew Nermal based on a memory of some bloated roadkill he saw once.
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