Let’s start with an extremely sensible ruleIf Alex Raymond places a woman in your path, do not question her motives. Or his. Just stop the wagon.Sure, she might try to kill you. But why focus on the negative? Too-Smart-For-The-Room Juxtapositions of the Day(Bizarro)(Lio)(Loose Parts)I want to see the Bizarro done as a performance piece in an […]
I don’t feature animations here very often because, well, because I hate them.Timing is one of the critical attributes of comedy, and, in a comic strip, it is a particular technique that sets static comedy apart from performance comedy, to coin a couple of terms.That is, timing is always critical, but when what you have […]
Since this arc on Betty has just started, I’ll give you both yesterday’s and today’s. Such a deal.Betty is a kind of stealth strip because it doesn’t get a lot of chatter and it doesn’t often knock you onto the floor with laughter, but it regularly sneaks up behind you with intelligent humor and commentary.I’m sure this […]
Liza Donnelly, via a cartoon at the Nib, raises an issue that I’ve been scratching my head over for about 30 years, but which now has taken on a new dimension under the relatively new term “slutshaming.”That is, back when Madonna appeared on the scene in the 80s, she was more of a puzzler than […]
I like this Kevin Siers panel for the message itself but I’m particularly impressed with his ability to make good use of an odd and viral news story.The story itself is as bizarre in its way as the phenomenon Siers uses it to comment on.With regards to the actual zoo, it took a lot of […]
(Kal Kallaugher) (Matt Bors)A fascinating pair of commentaries from a couple of my favorite commentors.I’m having trouble figuring out why we seem so reluctant to take Karzai at his word when he tells us to get out.Maybe we’re expected to ignore it; Maybe the State Department recognizes it as some of that same posing we in […]
I’m not much for Valentine’s Day, but today’s Wumo cracked me up.For one thing, it’s nice to see a Valentine’s Day cartoon that isn’t based on “Men are so insensitive!” in which the gag is either that he tried but got it wrong or that he completely forgot.In creative terms, those are the Y-chromosome version […]
While everyone is obsessing over the potential for an openly gay person to play football, little angels tap-dancing their way into heaven and the president using the same executive powers every president since Benjamin Harrison has used at a higher rate than he has but without being, y’know, uppity or Kenyan about it, Jim Morin […]
One of the founding principles of this blog is that a good cartoon spurs not just laughter, but thought. Today’s lesson is on how little the intent of the cartoon directs the tone of those thoughts.If you read the comments (and this is one of the few web sites where they won’t send you into […]
Yesterday I wrote of how what you miss about people once they are gone is the small moments, the casual conversations, the trivial stories. And this morning’s Bizarro touches off a memory of one of those things, with what is, on the surface, just an amusing pun.A type of gag I like, by the way, […]
The headline tells the story: I came across three comics in the last 24 hours that seem to me particularly excellent, each for different reasons. Jack Ohman — who moved from the Pacific Northwest to Sacramento a little over a year ago — uses a spare, economic style of storytelling that makes this piece extraordinarily touching, […]
It’s not considered hip to like the Lockhorns, but, while it is tragically bereft of misanthropic talking animals, it’s a consistently funny strip and John Reiner’s art is, to play with the phrase, “simply” superb.Not being an artist, I don’t know if it’s harder to create intricate detail or to work smoothly in a plain […]
Matt Bors leads off today with a relevant point in an irrelevant controversy: When did we start demanding that our artists, writers and actors provide not only entertaining work but perfect lives?He’s right. If you start going through the personal lives of creative geniuses, you’re going to uncover a mountain of ick in some cases […]
The estimated reduction stems almost entirely from a net decline in the amount of labor that workers choose to supply, rather than from a net drop in businesses’ demand for labor, so it will appear almost entirely as a reduction in labor force participation and in hours worked relative to what would have occurred otherwise rather than as an […]
By the time “Harold and the Purple Crayon” arrived on the scene, I was a semi-literate young man of five, and one who already knew the main character from poring through my parents’ collection of Barnaby. Different name, but it hardly mattered, because I hadn’t been able to read the words anyway. I knew he was […]