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 […]
Tom Tomorrow’s cartoon would be funny if it weren’t so directly taken from life.It seems, at first, a variation on the complaint about people being seen in grocery stores buying “luxury food items” with food stamps, which might, in reality, mean there is a birthday in the family, or it could be a sign of […]
I’ve said before that Richard Thompson remembers childhood better than anybody else working that beat, and today’s Cul de Sac is both hilarious on the face of it but also a reminder of how thin the barrier between reality and fantasy was in those days.Never mind the Tooth Fairy and other official fantasies. We also […]
One of the books my father gave me in my adult years was his copy of “Best of Yank,” a wartime compilation of that landmark newspaper that I spent more time perusing than he did.In addition to cartoons, the GIs on staff and in the field sent back some good illustrations of their lives at […]
J.R. Williams’ “Out Our Way” was a daily panel with a number of themes, including family comedy, sibling rivalry, factory doings and events on a ranch out west. Williams had worked both in a factory and on a ranch and he’d evidently once been a little boy, judging from how well he depicted little boys.It’s […]
Yesterday, I mentioned the idea that cartoonists probably do the medium no favor with cultural references that you have to be 50 years old to get.I have no idea how “Star Wars” references fit into that concept, since, on the one hand, it seems to be an eternal classic while, on the other, the constant […]
“Sally Forth” used to be one of those strips that you only read because it was almost entertainingly bad. Then, in 1999, Francesco Marciuliano took over the writing and gradually transformed it into something so odd that it has climbed to the top tier of my favorites.Sally herself has always been a traffic cop character, […]
Illustration by Stephane Peray (Stephff) of the Nation, Bangkok.I met a traveller from an antique landWho said: “Two vast and trunkless legs of stoneStand in the desert. Near them on the sand,Half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frownAnd wrinkled lip and sneer of cold commandTell that its sculptor well those passions readWhich yet survive, […]
Here’s a heads up to a potential development over at Baby Blues: The impending arrival of a puppy at the MacPherson household.The strip began when Jerry Scott and Rick Kirkman were attempting to brainstorm some kind of collaboration and Rick, a new father for the second time, became somewhat sidetracked by his other collaboration, as […]
“I just happened to be passing by.”Over at Comics Riffs, Michael Cavna is marking the 10th anniversary of the death of Herblock, which is appropriate because they are Washington Post people and because Herblock was a giant.It’s worth a look not just to hear what other cartoonists have to say about him, and not just […]
Stuart Carlson does, I think, a particularly fine job with this cartoon in that he does not telegraph whether he feels the politician is sincerely puzzled or purposefully ignoring the messages from the crowd. As the cartoon says, the message — including some very specific concepts — is out there to be heard by those […]
The Halloween cartoons have begun, and, so far, the most original story arc is coming from “Deflocked,” where Mamet is offended by a dog in a sheep costume.To properly appreciate this, you have to realize what an insensitive jerk Mamet is and how often he offends those around him. But I think Jeff Corriveau does […]