Cartoonists and Their Comics
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Featuring Lynda Barry on museums, Liam Francis Walsh too soon?, Charlie Daniel and Brad Boring for the kids, Joel Pett standup cartoonist, Russell Taylor and Charles Peattie create Alex, but we start with senior stripper Sidney Harris at the gym.
Sidney Harris at the Gym for a Pop-Up Exhibit
Sidney Harris, 92, walked into a gym, not to lift weights, but to look at art. His own art.
Allen Appel for The New Haven Independent follows cartoonist Sidney Harris to mActivity.
The Brooklyn-born, Erector Square-based artist has been making cartoons for decades — sometimes six or seven a day — for about 35,000 lifetimes so far.
Yet when Harris walked into mActivity on Nicoll Street a week ago, he found arrayed in front of him a current one-man show of his work.
On display are selections from his four decades as an under-the-radar but accomplished artist, with a specialty for the quirks, quarks, and contradictions of science, and with examples of his published work in magazines from Playboy, American Scientist, National Lampoon, and The New Yorker.
That’s because the East Rock gym, it turns out, also contains a gallery, in a corridor running from the gym’s entryway to the machines that make you sweat.
Holiday Show: Sidney Harris Cartoons/mActivity/285 Nicoll St., New Haven/Through Dec. 27
Sidney Harris’ cartoon website.
Lynda Barry, Drawn to MoMA
Lynda Barry’s “What’s in a Museum?” The renowned cartoonist and educator shares a childhood memory.
In this installment of Drawn to MoMA, cartoonist and teacher Lynda Barry shares a formative memory. In the midst of a family upheaval, 10-year-old Barry visits a museum and finds herself moved by art for the first time. As she describes the experience, “that alive thing happens and you’re someplace else.”
Barry recognizes that the visit awakened her to a possibility she hadn’t been aware of. “On that day I really existed,” she writes. “I felt it: some me that had a future apart from who I was at home.”
If Not Now, When?
CartoonStock holds a monthly cartoon caption contest and a follow-up commentary on the submitted gags, but recent developments forced them to make a decision if they forgo the commentary on last month’s contest or go ahead with it.
Says Lawrence Wood who evaluates the responses:
Because of this past weekend’s horrific mass shootings at Brown University in Rhode Island and at the Hanukkah celebration in Sydney, Australia, we came very close to pulling the following commentary on our 200th caption contest, which featured a drawing by New Yorker cartoonist Liam Francis Walsh. It’s set in a living room, where a nice-looking family is relaxing with their pets. Everyone (the father, mother, young son and daughter, and even the cat and dog and houseplant) is armed with an automatic rifle or handgun, and the dad is speaking.
In light of recent events, trying to find the humor in a cartoon about America’s gun culture can seem insensitive at best and cruel at worst. We understand that. Nevertheless, we made the decision to feature Walsh’s cartoon—which he first submitted to The New Yorker about ten years ago—weeks before the recent tragedies, and we evaluated the 400 contest entries, chose a winner and five finalists, and filmed our judging process and posted it on YouTube (and I drafted the commentary) before the shootings happened.
Therefore, despite the fact that many of you may understandably feel that this is “too soon,” we are running the commentary. Given the heartbreaking frequency of mass shootings, especially in this country, there is probably never a good time to publish a cartoon about America’s obsession with guns…
Out and About with Charlie Daniel
Long-time cartoonist Charlie Daniel turns 96 and gives the gift of smiles to young patients at East Tennessee Children’s Hospital.
WBIR presents a segment with Charlie Daniel and Brad Boring drawing for kids.
The Political Humor of Joel Pett
Late notice: Joel Pett brings his and provocative humor with a 45 minute set to the Orbit Room.
The Making of the Comic Strip Alex
Russell Taylor tells Telegraph readers how he and Charles Peattie created the Alex comic strip (or here).
The Alex cartoon strip was started in a bit of a hurry one day in 1986. One of us, Charles Peattie, had a commission to illustrate a strip about yuppies for a start-up paper called The London Daily News. He met the other – me – at the Christmas party of the magazine where we both worked. Knowing that Charles was looking for a co-writer, I pitched for the job. We had never worked together before and had just six weeks to get Alex off the ground. It began in February 1987.
In the end, something we thought might last about 18 months went on for almost four decades, ending only in April this year. We think the characters had such longevity because they rang true. So here, character by character, we reveal the inspiration behind them.
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