Last week, I enjoyed an email exchange with Rebecca Nappi of the The Spokesman Review. She’s renewed her interest in the funny pages after losing interest in them when she went away for college 34 years ago. She’s written a commentary about why the funnies have beaconed her return. The adult world is pretty scary […]
The Journal Gazette and Times-Courier (IL) has posted a follow-up to their recent comic survey. They have not said what changes they will make but here are some of the more interesting stats gleaned from the survey (for brevity, I’ve deleted some of the paper’s comments and simply left the facts): About half of the […]
Some belated news out of Indiana regarding the man who beheaded a Garfield statue with a “crazed hug (see back stories here, here and here.)” Joseph Savarino, age 23, was sentenced 90-day suspended sentence and ordered to perform 40 hours of community service and pay $200 in restitution for his role in the decapitation of […]
E&P is reporting that Berkeley Breathed, creator of Bloom County and the current Opus Sunday comic strip, will appear on America’s Most Wanted during a segment on the unsolved “Book of Days” murder of Michael Cahill in Austin, TX back. The Book of Days murder got its name from a calendar that ran from 1977 […]
Neil Cohn is a psychology student at Tufts University researching about visual language patterns and grammar. His current project is studying comics and as he says, “hopefully, by summer I should be testing peoples intutions on the grammar of these strips, and eventually looking at their brainwaves while processing them (fun!).” [sic].Part of his research […]
Girls & Sports co-creator Andrew Feinstein writes in to point me to a recent article in Time magazine about how the web is reinvigorating comics. I found the article to be a bit amateurish – it was clear that the writer didn’t know a great deal about which he was writing. While there are some […]
The LA Times is reporting that Marshall Rogers, best know of his work on the Batman comic book, passed away suddenly on Sunday at the age of 57. During his career he worked on other characters such as Silver Surfer, Mister Miracle, Dr. Strange, Iron Fist and G.I. Joe. He was the artist for a […]
According to E&P, Patrick McDonnell has a new Mutts collection (208 pages) that is due out in May. This is Patrick’s 16th Mutts collection book. The book is entitled: Animal Friendly
Character cross-overs aren’t too unusual, but there seemed to be a spike in the number this week. In Sunday’s Lio, Mark Tatulli featured a dysfunctional For Better or For Worse family as hot-headed and short-tempered. Mark also brought in the Charlie Brown and Lucy for a gag yesterday. Stephan Pastis used Bucky from Get Fuzzy […]
Patrick McDonnell’s Mutts has won a slot in The Times (Gainesville, AL) beating out Brian Crane’s Pickles narrowly with only 54 percent of the vote. While the paper has declared the winner in the “Comics March Madness” competition, it also concedes that there are more changes slated this summer.
Keith Knight, creator of (th)ink and the K-Chronicles, recently spoke at the University of Florida about his cartooning career, racism, terrorism and the Bush administration.
Dan Thompson, co-creator of the Humorous Maximums web site has announced the launch of the classic comic strip, “Latigo”. Latigo was created by Stan Lynde and is a western adventure (think Steve Canyon in cowboy boots) that ran from 1977 through 1983. Humorous Maximus has been granted the permission to run the full daily run. […]
While visiting the Buckeye state, I was able to visit the Ohio State University Cartoon Research Library in Columbus Ohio. Thanks to Craig Boldman who helped set things up, Jenny Robb, the library’s Associate Curator and Professor (what a cool job!) gave me a tour of the library and showed me their extensive collection. During […]
Today, Steve Boreman’s new feature Little Dog Lost is launching nationally. I had the opportunity to speak with Steve while I was in Ohio for the comic symposium. He’s funny and witty in person and his new feature is impressive as well. LDL is a deceptively subtle strip in almost every regard. The premise of […]
The National Cartoonist Society has announced the nominees for the various awards that will be given out during the Reuben weekend May 27th in Orlando this year. Here is the breakdown on who’s up for what: Cartoonist of the Year Bill Amend Dave Coverly Dan Piraro Feature Animation Peter De Seve, Character Design (Fox) “Ice […]