One of the old, hoary standbys of learning about political cartoons in high school is the list of symbols to be memorized: The bear is Russia, the bulldog is Great Britain, Uncle Sam is America, plus the list of landmarks like Big Ben, the Statue of Liberty, the Taj Mahal.We teach political cartoons the way […]
I ran this Bil Keane cartoon, from the pages of “Yank the Army Weekly,” recently, and posted it again on Facebook yesterday when Bil’s son Jeff announced his death.Of course, Bil Keane is not remembered for the cartoons he did as a GI during WWII, though the war in the Pacific is how he met […]
One of the frustrations of this blog is when I come across a comic that cracks me up, except …Except that they stepped on the punchline.Except that the setup is flawed and you have to assume what the cartoonist meant.Except that, while it’s funny, it relies on something that, while a lot of people believe […]
Marla is a gem, but today’s Retail is a reminder of how well working in the mall helps young people understand the world of employment.The relationship between the mall office and individual tenants can occasionally be fraught. The real relationship, of course, is between the mall ownership and the store ownership, neither of whom are […]
I was kind of hoping to lessen the political stuff in the mix, but today’s Candorville is irresistable.Darrin Bell must have some short deadlines, but, in any case, he rolled the dice and won with this one, since Cain has not yet manned up and faced the situation. A fine, fine job of anticipating the […]
I suspect that the kids who had Lincoln Peirce as an art teacher or coach in high school had a pretty good time. He seems to have a good sense of their lives.Big Nate is immensely popular with middle-school kids, and I suspect it’s because Peirce remembers what it was like, but, rather than totally […]
John Sherffius, of late the cartoonist for the Daily Camera in Boulder, Colorado, makes a statement that doesn’t involve a lot of fireworks or snark, but which seems sensible and very worth saying.There have been a couple of those lately, not so much from the ranks of editorial cartoonists as in the form of signs […]
I don’t always agree with Ted Rall’s black-and-white, hero-or-villain view of politics, but I like this cartoon a lot.It puts me in mind of Canadian comedian/performance artist Sandra Shamas, who used to talk about going to the Woolworth’s in Sudbury as a kid to interpret for her Lebanese-born mother and grandmother, who were under the […]
Dave Whamond’s “Reality Check” cracked me up today, and the bit of dialogue at the bottom is more of an enhancement than is usual for marginalia.And, once you know who they are, it gets funnier: A roomful of workaholics with their Smartphones out is as funny as an AA meeting with everyone clutching a glass […]
Pros & Cons dabbles in a bit of politics today, if only because “serving on the board” is a phrase so widely misunderstood by the public at large.I served on the board of the local United Way for a time, and on the board of the local chapter of Literacy Volunteers, as well as on […]
International political cartoons tend to be highly metaphorical. I don’t know how much the change of language over comparatively smaller geographic areas has to do with this and how much it simply is how political cartoons have evolved overseas, but it remains a fact of cartooning.The net effect for me, as someone raised on the […]
Halloween should be a dream for cartoonists, but, while the graphic potential is high, there are only so many gags: Parents eat the candy, kids try to amass great quantities of candy, kids eat too much candy, etc. And then each year, there is something trendy to work into the strips — bankers and OWS […]
Today’s Pat Oliphant cartoon puts me in mind of a story I’ve probably told here before, but am about to tell again.In the mid-to-late 1970s sometime, my then-wife and I were visiting my grandfather, an archetypal product of the American dream who had worked his way up from the mines to the executive offices. We […]
Pab Sungenis combines cultural literacy with demented foolishness on a level I really appreciate, and today’s “The New Adventures of Queen Victoria” is the conclusion of a short arc shoving a stick into the spokes of that nonsensical movie, “Anonymous,” which probes the theory that William Shakespeare was actually born in Kenya.Or something.I don’t particularly […]
Zach Weiner calls today’s Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal “a bit of an homage (to) the great Quino,” which perhaps means it’s a conceptual rip off, but, since I don’t read a lot of Argentine comics, I don’t know how much it’s based on something specific versus being based on Quino’s general pacing in his silent […]