Cartoonists Keep on Truckin’
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A few cartoonists, past and present, are spotlighted.
Vaughan Tomlinson
Magazine cartoonist Vaughan Tomlinson (Readers Digest, Airmail, Alta, Private Eye, The Oldie, Weekly Humorist, etc.) has been contributing panels to Comics Kingdom for a year now and The Kingdom’s Alex Garcia has now gotten around to interviewing him about how Vaughan goes about creating Oddly Enough and his other cartoon panels.
There’s a moment early in my conversation with Vaughan Tomlinson where I completely lose my train of thought.
Not metaphorically. Fully gone. Restart the intro, laugh it off, keep going. It stays in the final cut because it felt right for the kind of conversation we were about to have.
That’s more or less the energy behind Oddly Enough. It’s sharp, a little offbeat, and built on the kind of observations you almost miss if you’re not paying attention.
Wyatt Tremblay
Tim Kalinowski at Airdrie City View profiles Yukon News political cartoonist Wyatt Tremblay.
Tremblay, who now lives in Airdrie, has been skewering politicians and social circumstances in art for over three decades.
“I started working for the Yukon News in 1991, and in 1992 they had a political cartoonist … and he just sort of (quit out of the blue),” recalls Tremblay. “Someone at the Yukon News knew that I had aspirations to be a superhero comic artist. They said, ‘Hey, Wyatt can draw. Why don’t you get him to draw something?’ And that’s how it all began.”
Tremblay drew his first “Monty Pythonesque” cartoon at the behest of his editor at the time. That drawing went on to win a national Canadian Community Newspaper Association award for best cartoon. With that early success, Tremblay had a notion he might have a bit of knack for political cartooning.
The Far Side Successors
When The Far Side ended there opened up a panel slot in nearly two thousand newspapers and most of those editors wanted something similar to Gary Larson‘s sensibilities. At ScreenRant Ambrose Tardive takes a look at the four cartoons The Southeast Missourian asked its readers to choose as a replacement.
In December ’94, The Southeast Missourian asked its readers to pick between four potential replacements for The Far Side in the paper’s comics section.
After considering over a dozen applicants, the Missourian staff picked four finalists. The Bizarro, Farcus, Quigmans, and Rubes panels at the top of the page ran in the December 4, 1994 issue. (That was a Sunday, for those of you who were wondering.) The winner debuted on January 3, 1995, two days after the final Far Side.
Collectively [they] might not have wanted to be The Far Side, but they wanted to appeal to The Far Side’s audience. And to be clear, none of these cartoons were brand new in 1994. Farcus was the youngest of the quartet; it launched in 1991. Rubes was a decade old, having debuted in 1984. Bizarro started in ’85, and Quigmans in ’86.
The emphasis is on Bizarro.
Shannan Arney
In early 2006 Shannan Arney was serving in the U. S. Navy. Stars and Stripes takes us back to that time in one of their “From the Archives” profiles.
YOKOSUKA NAVAL BASE, Japan 2006: Petty Officer 2nd Class Shannan Arney has drawn since she was “old enough to know which end of a pencil to use,” but she just started comic strips a couple months ago while underway on the USS Blue Ridge. “Duty Blues” is a humorous look at aspects of Navy life, she said.
Read the full story here.
Tom Stiglich
Always a bit of a disappointment when cartoonists don’t acknowledge the source of their inspiration. This time it is Tom Stiglich not giving a hat tip to a famous Robert Crumb illustration for a recent cartoon.
feature image by Robert Crumb
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