Filed under: Blogs

Gary Varvel, editorial cartoonist for the Indianapolis Star, now maintains a blog and as done so since May.  A belated welcome to the blogosphere!

Marshall Ramsey:Marshall Ramsey has joined the blogosphere!

Today he’s announced that potential customers can browse his cartoon collection and purchase them on the spot.  Check out his blog for details and visit his web site/online store.

Marshall Ramsey, editorial cartoonist for the Clarion-Ledger in Jackson, MS, gives a behind-the-scenes look at the development of his daily cartoons.

Daryl Cagle invited readers to email him with their opinions regarding Steve Benson’s Marine Corps cartoon.  He received over 300 responses.We asked for it, and we got it – more than three hundred responses to the Benson cartoon below.

Mike Shelton, editorial cartoonist for the Orange County Register, began creating short animations last May and has now created five of them.  The animations are being done with co-worker Jocelyne Leger and the cartoons are also being distributed to other newspapers (as well as television) that belong to the same communication chain as the OC Register.Dave Astor has a much longer story detailing Mike’s work.

Dave Astor has a story (page 58) about the growing number of blogs that cover the cartooning industry.  Highlighted in the story are Tom Spurgeon’s Comics Reporter, The Daily Cartoonist, The Comics Curmudgeon’s Joshua Fruhlinger, and Daryl Cagle’s blog.

According to their new blog (authored by Derek, Dir. of Web Operations) the site is the combination of Universal’s uComics.com and GoComics.com web sites.  Aside from the obvious visual changes, the new site uses a Flash-based comic reader to thwart would be copyright violators.

Pulitzer Prize winning editorial cartoonist Matt Davies has joined the blogosphere according to Editor and Publisher…. From E&P:”My aim,” Davies wrote in his initial post, “is to pry the lid off the process and hardships that a newspaper editorial cartoonist encounters on deadline every day, and share it with whomever cares.”He added: “The best cartoonists should make it look easy.

In summation, he accuses most cartoonists as failures and the reason why cartooning will never be considered a legitimate art form.The basic nobility of that cause innoculates (for the most part) cartooning against the accusations that it is a vocation filled with practitioners (98% male and white) who couldn’t draw their way out of a paper bag if their life (or their profession) counted on it.Imagine turning on the Olympics and seeing 78% of the figure skaters fall on their asses…. Individual cartoonists deserve respect, but just because they earn it doesn’t mean a positive residue should trickle down upon anyone who puts nib to paper, had a cartoon published in the Anchorage Antler and manages to squeeze into a tux for the National Cartoonists Society Reuben Awards.For cartoonists to believe that respect would be a given when the vast majority of them would fail to push any aesthetic envelope or embrace even a modicum of visual experimentation is as audacious as it is self-delusional.

From Jim Borgman’s blog comes news that he’s been named as a finalist in this year’s EPpy Award given out by Editor and Publisher. The EPpy’s honor internet sites that are affiliated with the media industry. Jim was nominated for the Best Media-Affiliated News Blog and goes up against DayWatch (jsonline.com) and Crime Scene on […]

In another “check out this new blog” moment, may I direct your attention to Rod McKie’s The Cartoon Fiend where Rod interviews other cartoonists on a nearly daily basis. So far he’s interviewed Chris Browne’s (“Raising Duncan“) and Sandra Bell-Lundy (“Between Friends“). Yesterday’s blog entry was the ever prolific Randy Glasbergen.Rod also keeps his own […]

I thought The Daily Cartoonist had carved out a small niche in the blogosphere, but last night I came across one even more narrowly focused – yet nicely done. If you haven’t visited the Silent Penultimate Panel Watch – do so now. The SPPW is appropriately subtitled, “Each and every day a comic strip abuses […]