Our Constitution gives us the right to free speech. It is true that no freedom is absolute and is subject to certain reasonable limits but, at the same time, it is also true that the freedom of expression cannot be curbed at the flimsiest excuse.Yet, over the years, an atmosphere of intolerance has been created […]
I have previously expressed my affection for strips that stick something permanently in your mind. Today’s “Home and Away” does a masterful job.I’ve worked as a pizza cook, which wasn’t terribly successful, since there’s a lot of fast hand-eye work involved. I was much happier when they moved me to the grill, which involves more […]
Tom Tomorrow on the continued predominance of the “We had to destroy the village in order to save it” school of economic policy.For those too young to remember, that phrase comes from a point in the Vietnam War when it was decided to move peasants from villages in vulnerable rural areas to brand new villages […]
This is a page from “Congo 50,” a graphic novel produced by a group of Congolese artists to mark the nation’s 50th anniversary.You can read the first chapter here, plus get an insight into the purpose and process. I wish the pages had been done in a higher resolution or larger size, but I was […]
At his LATimes blog, David Horsey asks, regardless of how you feel about which one should run the country, which one would you have rather known in high school?I’m less willing to separate the issues. The child most assuredly is father of the man.And it can work both ways: Some bullies, in the process of […]
My life, as drawn by Sandra Bell-Lundy in today’s “Between Friends.”And it’s worse than this.The best part of telecommuting is that you can sit at your computer all day in your sweats. And, since everyone who knows your work is hundreds of miles away, if you need to go out and buy groceries, you don’t […]
Amid all this talk about same-sex marriage, there’s still a lot of regular-old-marriage out there to be mined for humor, or maybe for contemplation, and two of the better storytelling strips out there are doing wedding arcs at the moment.Or maybe not.Arlo and Janis is more of a “you got that right” strip than a […]
The gay marriage issue has divided editorial cartoonists this week.Not so much between “For” and “Against” as between “Timely” and “Whoops.”After Joe Biden’s remarks Sunday, there were a raft of cartoons criticizing Obama for not also speaking out in support of gay marriage. And then, on Wednesday, just about the time all those cartoons were […]
Francoise Mouly, art editor at the New Yorker and editor/compiler of the new book, Blown Covers, featuring art that never made the cover, has posted this strip, a 1993 collaboration between her husband, Art Spiegelman, and Maurice Sendak, who died yesterday.You can click on the picture for a larger version, and then click here to […]
Non Sequitur, with an observation on the state of reality television and, thus, on the state of reality.”Reality television” has always been somewhat artificial, simply because editors and producers make decisions on what you’re going to see. This can range from something as innocent as cutting out the boring parts to the common-but-misleading policy of […]
Two weeks or so ago, NPR had a feature on the morning show about some fellow who sells custom poetry the way caricature artists sell caricatures. He sits at some farmers market/craft fair place and people give him a few bucks whereupon he takes their names and a random fact or two about them and […]
One of the recurring gags in the underestimated surrealist comedy, “Green Acres,” was that, just as an apparent need arose, hustler and conman Mr. Haney would appear on the doorstep with a solution.As noted in today’s The Brilliant Mind of Edison Lee, Mr. Haney’s truck has gone high tech, thanks to Google and our willingness […]
It was said that, if you sat at the Moulin Rouge long enough, everyone in the world would eventually pass by. Not, obviously, a literal statement. Nor is it literally true that, if you visit justthefirstframe.com, you will see the first frame of every webcomic on the Internet.But there are a lot of them there, […]
In Big Nate, Nate has decided to cash in on the market for romance novels by writing a bodice-ripper set in the War of 1812.By coincidence, yesterday I got to see the printer’s dummy for my historical novel, aimed at middle-school kids like Nate, which is also set in the War of 1812. And I […]
I like Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal a lot, but this one touched off mostly memories of how much this wasn’t my experience. That wouldn’t have seemed as striking except that, for some reason I can’t identify, I’ve gone through a sequence of dreams in the last week or so that involved old girlfriends. Nothing erotic, mind […]