Darrin Bell makes the iconic statement. I like Clay Bennett’s declaration that school shootings are the new normal, but here’s the distinction that I see:Bennett’s cartoon suggests that we’re still trying to protect our children.Bell’s says, rather, “Here is where we are.”And, by God, here is where we are.We’re not trying to protect our children. We […]
So, as long as we’re on the topic of peeking behind the curtain to see the stories behind the comics, here are a couple of other examples.Sherman’s Lagoon is one of my favorites because of Jim Toomey’s deft use of timing and character to create riffs that remind me of the Bob Newhart Show (the […]
Pardon My Planet reminds me of my last (three-dimensional) editing job. I had a staff of about a half dozen, which sounds small but was fewer people than it would have taken to do what was being demanded of them and, thus, of me.I was aware that people checked Facebook from time to time and […]
I was a bit coy yesterday about the whole Bill Watterson/Stephan Pastis thing because, at the pre-dawn hour when I was cobbling it together, the story still seemed confined to the insider sites and I didn’t want to spoil the surprise for people who had missed the reveal.About 30 seconds later, it was all over […]
This began as a rumor, expanded into a tease and then was finally confirmed.Pearls Before Swine had an arc this week in which a guest artist provided much more stylistically finished artwork than PBS creator Stephan Pastis could have, in an arc in which the premise is that a second grader has taken over the […]
So I guess the answer to “Have you no sense of decency?” is “Nope. None at all.”Clay Bennett nails it about as well as it can be nailed, on a day when we all pause to pay tribute to the Greatest Generation before going back to betraying the values they sacrificed to preserve.Bennett’s combination of […]
This was an exceptionally good day on the comics page, full of doubles and triples and not a few home runs, so let me do a quick NPR rant and say that, if you don’t have a Comics Kingdom and/or GoComics account, well, you’re missing out on supporting some good work, even if you are […]
Andy Warner tells us all about the pizzly bear at the Nib on Medium.com, and you should go have a look at the whole thing for two reasons:1. It’s interesting and well-presented.2. The fact that it’s interesting and well-presented hit me at the right moment, because it’s part of a whole issue of graphic non-fiction […]
Alex is a British comic strip about business, and I’m willing to admit that my years of writing about business, combined with childhood subscriptions to Swift, Eagle and finally Punch may have set me up for this one.However, it’s not so businessy and British that it won’t work for a general audience elsewhere, and today’s […]
Clay Jones on the dismay conservatives are expressing over the release of Sgt.Bowe Bergdahl from five years as a POW.Apparently, letting Qatar act as a go-between to set up a prisoner exchange is not, in their minds, as noble as breaking an international arms embargo to sell weapons to Iran and then using the money […]
I mentioned recently that I’m trying to avoid TLDNR Syndrome. Today offers a chance, since a lot of cartoonists have served up strips that require little elaboration.Much as I contend that a good strip makes you laugh because it made you think, there are ones that make you laff, which is different. They still raise […]
The other day, I started my reflections on the Santa Barbara shootings with a cartoon drawn in the wake of the 1981 assassination attempt on Ronald Reagan. Here, Steve Breen makes a more pointed comment on a massacre that happened just a few years later.And so here we sit, three decades later, still asking the […]
Dan Thompson strikes a nerve with today’s Brevity.I noted the other day that Barnes & Noble, for those of us outside the megalopolis where it is apparently staffed by people who know how a book operates, is not a bookstore so much as it is just another faceless Big Box, and it’s the faceless Big […]
Edison Lee takes on a nearly impossible challenge: Coming up with a toy that is more ridiculous and tasteless than what’s already out there.I’m so old. (How old are you?)I’m so old that I can remember when Children’s Television Workshop was about education. Well, I guess it still is.Behold Elmo’s Cell Phone, doing for real […]
Let’s go back 33 years, with this Jim Mazzotta commentary on the attempted assassination of Ronald Reagan.John Hinckley was not a massacre shooter, but he operated in something of the same arena: Attempting a grand public gesture, at which, as Mazzotta’s cartoon suggests, he succeeded.He only wanted to attract the attention of one person, but that […]