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If It’s Tuesday This Must Be Toonville (Comic Strip Roundup)

Published: August 26, 2025 2 minutes 9 comments

With Alfredo P. Alcala, Jim Keefe, Stephan Pastis, Charles M. Schulz, Ricardo (Liniers) Siri, Bill Watterson, Brian Walker, and Scott Jerolds.

An Alfredo Alcala Centenary

This is a days late acknowledgement of Filipino cartoonist Alfredo P. Alcala’s birth day 100 years ago. His comic book art in the Philippines and in the U.S. is justly acclaimed, but his comic strip work is mostly ignored. No mention of it in Lambiek’s Comiclopedia and a very brief mention of his Star Wars work in his Wikipedia entry. So I thought I would show some of it here. Rick O’Shay artist 1977-1978; Conan the Barbarian artist 1980; Star Wars artist (not just penciller as said in the Wiki)1980-1981; Star Trek artist for one week in 1983.

Rick O’Shay by Alfredo Alcala and Marian J. Dern
Conan the Barbarian by Alfredo Alcala and Roy Thomas
Star Wars by Alfredo Alcala and Russ Helm
Star Trek by Alfredo Alcala and Gerry Conway

Squeezin’and a-Squishin’

Sally Forth artist Jim Keefe shows the disrespect newspapers (read paginators) show to comic strips.

Sally Forth by Jim Keefe and Ces

From Jim Keefe’s substack:

When you’re producing a comic strip, the Syndicate gives you a standard size regarding the proportions to draw it in. Back in the day, this was so newspapers could place them accordingly on the comics page – no problem.

Jump ahead to today’s free-for-all, and the “geniuses” in charge of formatting them have decided there’s no need to shrink the comics proportionally. Just squash and stretch them to whatever works. Who gives a crap if it looks wonky.

Jim’s not particularly happy about newspapers shrinking the Sunday funnies so much that they are able to squeeze 10 half-page format Sunday strips onto one of their 11 inch wide comics pages either.

partial of a page from the Minnesota Star Tribune Sunday comics section

Rat Makes The Evening News

A recent Pearls Before Swine comic strip made prime time news at KLAS-TV Las Vegas.

Driving You Crazy KLAS-TV featuring Pearls Before Swine

LAS VEGAS ( KLAS ) – The ongoing issue of drivers and pedestrians has landed – – in the funny papers.

Cartoonist Stephan Pastis started a recent “Pearls Before Swine” comic with the character “Rat” talking to “Goat” about a “memo to pedestrians of the world.”

Essential Peanuts # 20 (and #21)

ComingSoon is excited to debut four pages from Abrams ComicArts’ The Essential Peanuts by Mark Evanier, which collects some of the most important comic strips by Charles M. Schulz. The book celebrates the 75th anniversary of the comic…

Essential Peanuts #20

A few more pages from the upcoming The Essential Peanuts book courtesy of ComingSoon.

The deluxe coffee table book will come out on October 7, 2025. Appropriately priced for the 75th anniversary, the hardcover book in a slipcase will cost $75 and come with a portfolio of bonus extras (postcards, prints, an embroidered patch, stickers, and a facsimile of a classic Peanuts comic book). It also features an introduction by Patrick McDonnell (Mutts) and a foreword by Jean Schulz.

The Essential Peanuts by Charles M. Schulz by Mark Evanier can be preordered from Abrams.

Liniers Interviewed and Again

In The Ghost of Wreckers Cove by husband and wife team Liniers & Angelica Del Campo, a father and his two daughters move to an old New England house with an adjacent lighthouse for the summer. But soon the sisters discover that something supernatural may be afoot. Could the lighthouse be haunted? And if so, by who? And why? The Ghost of Wreckers Cove will be available from Mad Cave Studios imprint Papercutz at a local comic shop and/or bookstore near you beginning September 16th, 2025.

The Ghost of Wreckers Cove cover
The Ghost of Wreckers Cove page 9

Avery Kaplan at Comics Beat interviews cartoonist Liniers (Ricardo Siri) about long form comics.

KAPLAN: What is your collaborative process with your wife, Angelica Del Campo, like?

LINIERS: We do very separate things and we don’t generally interfere with the other one’s process. She will write the script and send it to me, and I will then draw based on the text. She doesn’t often describe very much so I have a lot of room to create the look and feel of the story. 

The Ghost of Wrecker’s Cove is available for preorder now, and where books are sold on September 16th.

Macanudo: Welcome to Elsewhere

While over at the Comics Kingdom:

If you’ve ever stumbled across Macanudo, chances are you’ve been charmed by its penguins, witches, or a perfectly odd joke about Back to the Future. This week on Inside the Kingdom, we sat down with cartoonist Ricardo Liniers—fresh from winning his second Reuben Award for Best Newspaper Comic Strip—to talk about how his strip came to life, why he loves mixing pop culture into his comics, and what’s next for him.

Liniers and Alex, Sam and Darth Vader

Our friend Alex Garcia interviews cartoonist Liniers about the Macanudo comic strip.

One Exquisite Hardcover

The Complete Calvin and Hobbes

Calvin and Hobbes is celebrating its 40th anniversary and so a major promotion from Andrews McMeel Publishing is The Complete Calvin and Hobbes. But they say it is “now available as one exquisite hardcover collection.” The first time I read that I thought they had issued a new edition as one volume! But it is the three volume slipcased edition they are talking about.

I was thinking they did what Abrams did with Brian Walker’s The Comics Before/The Comics Since 1945.

Oh well.

The Funtastic World of Hanna-Barbera

We’ll close with a recommendation: Head over to Scott Jeralds‘ Retro Cartoons Facebook page.

Quick Draw McGraw by Scott Jeralds

We all read The Flintstones and Yogi Bear in our Sunday funnies back in the day, now read Sunday comics featuring Quick Draw McGraw and Baba Looey, Augie Doggie and Doggie Daddy, Pixie and Dixie, Huckleberry Hound, and more!

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Comments 9

  1. Rather than “now”, it would have been more correct to announce that the “Complete Calvin & Hobbes” will be “once again” released in hardcover. The first edition was published in hardcover exactly 20 years ago. Each of the three volumes is very heavy, almost uncomfortable to read; combining all three into a single volume would never work.

  2. McNaught Syndicate distributed with licence from Hanna-Barbera 1960’s to early 1980’s the Flintstones and Yogi Bear comic strips for newspapers, but I don’t know if McNaught and H-B tried to do a Scooby-Doo comic strip for newspapers in the 1970’s.

  3. By the way, the name is Scott JERALDS, not Scott Jerolds.

  4. Liniers’ Macanudo is a fantastic strip, and he’s a really really nice guy. He’s well-worth going to meet if he’s in town playing music or doing a book tour.

  5. When The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel was publishing the daily HI & LOIS (if they aren’t currently) their positioning of it on their comics page actually vertically stretched it so the circular heads of all the characters were clearly ovals. I can’t recall if it was the Journal or the Eau Claire Leader Telegram who did a similar thing with the Sunday PEANUTS, so the round-headed kid was also oval-headed, confusing Snoopy even more on what he should call him, no doubt. Gotta fill that negative space!

  6. I hate to get negative here. especially on a website that I value. It was sad that the Rick O’Shay strip didn’t end with the passing of the strip’s creator, Mr. Stan Lynde. No one could match his ability to capture the feel and ambiance of the old West, especially as it pertains to the State of Montana. And Mr. Lynde was one of the great western artists on a par with Fredrick Remington and Charles Russell. Just need to provide kudo’s for the artist that made Rick O’Shay and Hipshot Percussion my childhood hero’s.

    1. Oh I’m not saying that Alcala was the best on any of those comic strips (I enjoyed his larger comic book work over the postage stamp-sized comic strips). Stan Lynde was THE Rick O’Shay cartoonist; John Buscema’s short tenure on Conan was the shining moment of that comic strip; and for Star Wars…hmmm: Russ Manning? Al Williamson? Alfredo was brought on to fill the gap between those two.

      Clarification – It was a contract dispute twixt Lynde and copyright owner Chicago Tribune-New York News Syndicate that ended Lynde continuing on Rick O’Shay in 1977, not his death. Stan would go on to create the Latigo comic strip from 1979 to 1983. Lynde would pass 30 years after that in 2013.

      1. It wasn’t as if Stan Lynde retired after 1983. He turned his talents to writing and produced eight western novels staring Merlin Fanshaw. Definitely worth a read if you like westerns.

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