Awards Comic strips Events Reuben

Massachusetts Mark Takes Reuben

Skip to comments

D. D. Degg Published: August 25, 2025 at 7:52 am EDT 1 minute 0 comments

Mark Parisi‘s win of The Reuben for the National Cartoonists Society‘s 2024 Cartoonist of the Year is getting some attention in his local papers.

Joann Mackenzie writing for the North of Boston Media Group filed the story.

As seen in The Gloucester Daily Times:

When he got the letter saying he’d been nominated, he said he thought they had “the wrong Mark.”

But the National Cartoonists Society was right on the mark when members awarded Gloucester’s Mark Parisi the Reuben Award — the “Oscar of the cartooning world” — a gleaming statuette that comes with the title “Outstanding Cartoonist of the Year.”

From the same story in The Salem News:

To the crowd of top cartoonists who’d gathered in their tuxes to cheer his win, he said, in an insider’s aside that brought the house down, “Better even than the leg lamp.”

For those of you who, like this reporter, may be wondering, what a leg lamp is, Parisi explains that it is from the 1983 movie “The Christmas Story,” a cult classic. It is to cartoonists the penultimate award in that spoofs awards themselves, even though cartoonists like to get them.

Cartoonists, whose lives are spent spoofing life itself, are a special breed, Parisi says, with a highly developed sense of the absurd. They are, he said, “my people, my family.”