This Week’s Comics Page Revue
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Well That Would Explain It, If Only…
On the last Sunday of 2002 a Mandrake the Magicain adventure ended and so did the Mandrake Sunday page.
And today we learn why.
Mandrake was kidnapped by Sea Hag’s witch sister and kept in her dungeons until now.
Which would be a great reveal except Mandrake continued for another 11 years as a daily by Fred Fredericks until the cartoonist’s health forced him to retire. In the middle of a story.
Unless those following years are not canon and were just fever dreams by Mandrake while under the spell of Sea Hag’s sister. And that would explain those fantastical Fredericks stories of the 21st Century,
Cartoonist John Rose celebrates Flag Day in the Barney Google and Snuffy Smith comic strip with a throwback to Snuffy’s service for his country during the World War Two years.
Impressions
Charles Ettinger‘s art for this past week’s Dick Tracy has been impressive, especially since midweek, as has been the Shane Fisher colors that complimented the drawings wonderfully. (Not that the cartooning of the previous strips were wanting.) Though today was a bit disappointing to this fan of Chester Gould‘s grotesquerie.
It’s the shoulder shots. That whip should have gone across Solitaire’s face scarring him for life and the bullet should have landed right between Double-Up’s eyes. As I said I’m a fan of Gould’s violent encounters.
Also the Mason Mastrioanni special effects in this week’s Wizard of Id made an impression on me.
And Then There Was This
Caroline Cash has been revitalizing, in her own way, Ernie Bushmiller‘s characters and situations in the current Nancy. So did she subtly reintroduced Phil Fumble back into the Nancy strip yesterday?
Or maybe it is Ernie Bushmiller?
I don’t know where this is going, and up until now the it has been played for laughs. If Friday’s issue was meant in that vein it failed with me. I thought Little Baldo calling for his Mommy was very sad.
My increasingly frequent rant about GoComics failure to include title panels with the Sunday strips.
It is a shame that we have to go to the creators’ Facebook pages, like Will Henry, to see them. Here’s a group hug to the cartoonists that do post these extras GoComics doesn’t.
And Comics Kingdom, who are really pretty good at it, seems to have tripped up on the Rosebuds front.
Yeah, if you see newspapers on the street anymore they are usually the result of being wind blown into the alleys and gutters. Certainly not on sidewalks in vending boxes as they were everywhere in the last century.
Though comics in newspapers are also on the decline.
Of course the editors and publishers of newspapers are not happy about the disappearing comics situation:
Correspondence from readers on the topic touched upon several recurring themes. Above all, they said the funnies bring much-needed levity and are a bright spot at a time when divisiveness and bad news dominate the media.
Other resounding comments were that the comics…
We understand and deeply appreciate all those points, and we would like to add one more: We miss the comics, too [emphasis added].
But to paraphrase The Newburyport News (or here): Tough $#!+.
New Comic
I haven’t set this up as a separate “New Local Comic: Ed & Pudge by Bailey Primus” post because I can’t find anything about this as a newspaper comic strip. It appeared this weekend in The Iowa Falls Times Citizen. Is it a one-off? Is this the start of a new regular feature for the newspaper? If so is it Sunday only?
Ed & Pudge by Bailey Primus has been around for a while, but in newspapers?
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