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 […]
Let’s start, for a change, with the Juxtaposition of the Day: (Between Friends) (Watch Your Head)I warned Maeve not to go to Europe with her ex. Well, actually, I warned her not to call him in the middle of the night.Which she did.Before she went to Europe with him, which I would note she did […]
Rob Rogers is first off the drawing board with this post-Super Bowl commentary, and I think it’s going to be hard to top. The flap over Coke’s commercial has pretty much shunted aside the fact that Cheerios not only brought back their interracial couple, but now with the news that the woman is pregnant. Apparently, either new […]
I meant to put up a “new story” alert the other day when this arc launched at Pirate Cove, but it’s not too late to jump on board. That’s not an off-hand remark: Story arcs at Pirate Cove tend to go on for months and to become absurd and convoluted to the point where dropping in […]
Hats off to Terri Libenson for a fresh take on what is generally one of the lamest days of the year on the comics page.Granted, she’s riffing on the now-iconic movie rather than the over-promoted tradition itself, but I’m also giving her credit for an overall breakthrough: The new wrinkle for the “over-worked mom” theme […]
(Keith Knight) (Darrin Bell)Okay, gang, this isn’t about sports, though that happens to have been the venue, so, if you’re not a sports fan, stick with me.It’s about the difference between tee-heeing over some kinds of misbehavior while going apoplectic over something far more minor. Or, shall we say, the “shades of difference” involved.Here’s what […]
I am not particularly obsessed with age at the moment, despite having just hit the magical Sgt. Pepper milestone, which I noted the other day with some links to prufrockian thoughts of the past.Still, the issue of coming into the home stretch is there, and, while today’s Beetle Bailey made me laugh in a “there […]
Well, only in the sense of using up my store of knowledge on the topic of Executive Orders before the flood of post-SOTU cartoons had arrived … (Pat Oliphant) (Drew Sheneman) (Jim Morin) Well said, all.But, as said, I went through the “executive orders” thing yesterday, so you can scroll down if you missed it, but, […]