Mike Peterson

Since I’m tied up running workshops for young writers, here’s a little something from Walt Kelly’s 1956 collection, “Songs of the Pogo.” Also available as an audio book or some such. 

Gocomics has just launched “Origins of the Sunday Comics,” and I guess the best way to explain it is to reprint their explanation:This series will present the earliest offerings—from 1895 to 1915—of the famous and lesser-known cartoonists who where there when comics were born—over 150 creations from more then 50 superb artists, most reproduced here […]

After yesterday’s conceptual extravaganza, I’m resting my brain, with the help of this silly “The Flying McCoys” panel.One of the questions anyone in the arts faces is “Where do you get your ideas?”There’s no real answer to that, because the really complex ideas start and build and grow … but the dumb ones, at least […]

The river of Trayvon Martin/George Zimmerman cartoons should begin flooding in any time now, but my expectations are very low and I’m not going to wait to tackle the topic.Besides, I like Daryl Cagle’s take: It’s not only simple and clean, but doesn’t over-reach. Nice piece of wordplay, too.I doubt anyone’s going to top it […]

Start with the easy one: Brian Anderson’s Dog Eat Doug, starring Sophie the Chocolate Lab and Doug the Be-diapered Pre-Toddler.I’m a cynical and hard-nosed critic, but, despite that, I really love this strip. Which is okay, because Brian also does this kind of thing and so neither of us is as simple in outlook as […]

I finally got rid of my typewriter about five years ago. I’d hauled it on two moves without ever plugging it in and decided it was silly to take it on a third. Which is to say, I’d held onto it for considerably more than a decade without using it. Closer to two.As Wiley notes […]

Tim Eagan points out the obvious in Deep Cover, and I don’t know why he bothers.I don’t know why I bother to pass it on.I’d say that Jesus spent half his ministry criticizing religious hypocrites who quote Scripture to explain why they don’t follow Scripture, but that wouldn’t be true.At least, I don’t think it’s […]

David Horsey saved me from doing something I really didn’t want to.I was thinking about creating an empty box with “Sorry — No Cartoon Available” in the middle and running it as a comment on how cartoonists have missed the target with the Egyptian whatever-it-is. Coup. Restructuring. Revolution. Reformation.It’s been a little disorienting, in fact: […]

Here are yesterday and today’s episodes of “Gil.”When this strip first started, I had some serious reservations about the character of Gil’s father. As a divorced dad myself, I don’t take kindly to “deadbeat dad” portrayals, in part because it’s a stereotype and in part because it’s accurate enough to be an embarrassment to the […]

Edison Lee coincidentally, and with his usual deadpan elan, provides an entry point for today’s sermonette with an homage to “Bloom County.” Or was that “Opus”?That is, it was Opus the Penguin who famously could not resist infomercials offering turnip twaddlers. But he did it in “Bloom County.” “Bloom County” was a landmark strip that ran […]

Joel Pett on the mote in Africa’s eye and the beam in our own.It’s a challenging cartoon that brings up all sorts of arguments over history, over foreign policy, over shared humanity, over perspective.The other day, I touched on naming conventions and how various people tend to refer to themselves as “people” and then find […]

Francesco Marciuliano is so good at being a wiseass that it’s easy to overlook the depth required for true wiseassery, as opposed to knee-jerk, calculatedly-irreverent, frat-boy/morning zoo stuff. This is not the first time he’s taken off the jester’s hat at Sally Forth, but he’s rarely this straightforward, and that is a good reason why the strip […]

Jeff Koterba on the tempest-in-a-teacup over naming Pluto’s newest moons.Egypt isn’t the only place where asking people what they want can result in problems when what they want isn’t what they ought to want or what you wanted them to want or, at the very least, what you (in your wisdom) feel is best for […]

Dilbert expands upon one facet of my anti-cloud rant from a couple of weeks ago.I’m not against progress. I’m against trusting. I might use the cloud as a backup in case my laptop becomes toast and my hard drive ditto, which, given the floods and other plagues we’ve been unleashing on ourselves lately, isn’t impossible. (If […]

There are any number of strips and, particularly, political panels today noting the apparent disconnect between surveillance and freedom, but I think Wiley caught it best in Non Sequitur.The big Fourth of July celebration on the National Mall now involves enough scrutiny that it’s ripe for positioning as an ironic symbol of where things stand, […]