News, Notes, and Updates
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With Greg Evans, Paul Noth, Howie Noel, Sandra Bell-Lundy, Matt Kindt, and Keith Frady and Phillip Ginn.
Evans’s English
Greg Evans has written letters to The San Diego Union-Tribune column Lederer on Language questioning the use of English. Richard Lederer has recently collected and printed a few of them.
Greg writes, “I stumble on (and at age 78 you’d think I’d have plenty else to stumble on) who vs. whom. Fortunately, this is something not a single cartoonist worries about these days because all we write is dialogue and, really, who says ‘whom’? Not Luann. Not Hagar the Horrible. Okay, maybe Mary Worth.”
Lederer replied:
If a pronoun can be replaced by he or she, the correct word is who. “I know he did it” = “I know who did it.” If the pronoun can be replaced by him or her, the correct word is whom: “Do you trust her?” = “Whom do you trust?”
Greg also inquires about “bi-” and “semi-” and then about something I have mulled over:
“I am a member of ‘The National Cartoonists Society’ (official title), or should we be ‘The National Cartoonist’s’ or Cartoonists’ Society’?”
Noth Up North
The other day we reported on cartoonist Paul Noth being proclaimed Wisconsin’s first Cartoon Laureate. Paul himself has written about it in his Noth Things Substack:
The Museum of Wisconsin Art has named me—of all people—our state’s very first Cartoonist Laureate, effectively clothing me in immeasurable power. Here’s my list of demands: a golden “Laureate” sash, a crown sculpted entirely from Hook’s 20-Year Aged Cheddar, and unlimited use of the Oscar Mayer Wienermobile.
My childhood dream of a personal reign of terror can finally become a reality…
Noel Gets Covered
Clover Press, in association with the Library of American Comics, continues its efforts to produce paperback editions of earlier hardcover books. The latest is another set of Dick Tracy volumes. Occasional artist of Dick Tracy‘s comic strip Howie Noel was enlisted to draw the cover of 1963 issue.
Frady and Ginn are Talking Back
Still at the Kickstarter site – here’s an interesting and strange effort: Good Grief: The End of Talking Back.
Good Grief: The End of Talking Back is about a reclusive cartoonist named Chance who created the newspaper strip Talking Back in the ’90s, and it would grow to rival Peanuts and Calvin & Hobbes in its popularity. The strip abruptly ended when the family-friendly fare suddenly turned dark and surreal following Chance’s public mental and emotional breakdown.
Talking Back
This is also a story about an imaginative boy named Chase, his shapeshifting pet parrot Eddie, and how the two came to the end of their 20-plus years of childhood antics with the sudden disappearance of their friend Sally. Chase has been a stand-in for the cartoonist Chance since the strip’s inception, with Eddie acting as both id and superego to the energetic and opinionated child
Keith Frady and Phillip Ginn are producing a “graphic novella about the breakdown and disappearance of a popular cartoonist, as seen through the lens of his newspaper strip.”
Bell-Lundy Illuminates
Last month it was reported that Sandra Bell-Lundy was easing her work load with Between Friends going weekly. Recently she explained it more fully to her Facebook friends:
While I have stepped back from creating my Between Friends dailies, I am continuing to create new Sundays and I’m writing them from the characters’ current ages which is approaching their sixties. Susan still has her partnership in her new job, Kim still has her book deal and Maeve is still with Benoit.
I hope it’s not all too confusing. My reasons for discontinuing the dailies are two-fold. The first being is that creating a daily strip is a very demanding marathon. I’ve loved every minute of it and still can’t believe I’ve been able to have an entire career just making comics! But after 36 years, I felt I was ready to reduce the pace a bit.
Sandra expanded a bit on her reply in a reply to a comment:
I’ve begun to write the sundays as a narrative arc rather than just my usual sunday one-offs. Susan still has her partnership, Kim still has her book deal and grandbaby and Maeve still has Benoit!
Kindt’s Seal of Approval
Alex Zalben at Comic Book Club reports on Matt Kindt‘s anti-ai seal.
The 100% Human-Made emblem is designed by Kindt, who is a human (just FYI), and is, per PR, “a new, open-source certification for comics, graphic novels, and other visual, musical and audio forms of creative work to designate them as fully derived of the human imagination and otherwise free of elements designed or enhanced by generative artificial intelligence.”
The “100% HUMAN-MADE” certification is created under the Creative Commons “Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International” license. Under those terms, artists seeking to utilize the “100% HUMAN-MADE” certification can “distribute, remix, adapt, and build upon the material in any medium or format” for commercial and not-for-profit purposes, as long as it carries the following Creative Commons attribution:
100% HUMAN-MADE © 2026 by Matt Kindt, LLC is licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0
a high-res .eps file is available for download online right now, and at OniPress.com.
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