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Peter Gallagher and Heathcliff; The Dartmouth Cartoonists: Mindy Kaling, Phil Lord, Christopher Miller, and Jake Tapper; and Marjane Satrapi cartooning for Le Monde.
Heathcliff in The New York Times
Calum Marsh for The New York Times profiles Peter Gallagher, “He Made ‘Heathcliff’ Absurd.”
On a recent afternoon, Peter Gallagher was wrapping up a lecture on Editorial Illustration, the class he has taught for 17 years at Montclair State University in northern New Jersey, when a student approached him with a burning question: “Is it true that you invented the Garbage Ape?”
While “Heathcliff” is published seven days a week in more than 1,000 daily newspapers, that didn’t mean much for Gallagher’s students. “Kids don’t read the newspaper,” Gallagher said in a video call from his home in nearby Glen Ridge. “I don’t think they even know what a newspaper is.”
That 1,000 circulation figure surprised me. The article tells of Peter learning from his cartooning uncles George, the creator of Heathcliff, and John, a famed magazine gag cartoonist, and his turning the comic panel from his uncles’ type of humor to his own with a “slightly surreal, logic-defying quality.”
Dartmouth College Cartoonists Who Strayed
Doonesbury by Garry Trudeau, Bloom County by Berkeley Breathed, and The Boondocks by Aaron McGruder are just a few syndicated comic strips that got their start in college newspapers.
Narrow the list of college cartoonists down to Dartmouth and the list would name-check Theodore Geisel (Dr. Seuss), and New Yorker cartoonists Abner Dean and Lars Kenneth, and editorial cartoonist Steve Kelley.
And then there were the Dartmouth cartoonists who drifted away from the fame and fortune of the craft and settled for lesser careers.
Mindy Kaling ’01, Phil Lord ’97, Christopher Miller ’97 and Jake Tapper ’91. These names may ring a bell as notable Dartmouth alumni with successful careers in media. But what unites them beyond the screen and their undergraduate degrees is an even more exciting and prestigious tenure as cartoonists for The Dartmouth.
Tapper began writing comics for The Dartmouth in the first few weeks of his freshman year and, by his sophomore summer, published five days a week…
When Kaling was a cartoonist for The Dartmouth, she had a comic strip called “Badly Drawn Girl,” in which Kaling commented about life as a female student at Dartmouth…
Miller’s recurring comic strip was called “Sleazy the Wonder Squirrel Show,” which featured a “chain-smoking talk show host,” according to the Hollywood Reporter.
Lord’s was called “Loud Mouth.” One comic strip featured “Christmas gifts currently under investigation for copyright infringement,” which made a joke of people creating “tickle-me Elmo” knockoffs which were less adorable to tickle.
The Comic Strips of Marjane Satrapi
In 2005, a couple years after her Persepolis graphic novel appeared, famed international cartoonist Marjane Satrapi contributed cartoons and comic strips to Le Monde 2, Le Monde‘s weekly magazine supplement. For Le Monde Clément Ghys looks back on the Satrapi comics for the paper (or here).
Two months later, Le Monde 2 once again invited Satrapi to contribute. She created “Ma semaine” (“My Week”), a comic strip in the form of a personal column. For two months, she discussed French politics, Lance Armstrong’s doping scandal, the global economy… Her humor was still there, biting, but always tinged with a sense of tragedy that Satrapi, like her country, could never escape.
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