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 Columbus Dispatch has a commentary by Ann Fisher regarding the 30 year anniversary of the Ohio State University Cartoon Research Library that Lucy Shelton Caswell began back in 1977. The library boasts 2.5 million comic-strip clippings, about 250,000 original cartoons and 51,000 serial titles, including comic books. This Wednesday, Scott McCloud, will be at […]
In a surprise announcement, Chicago Tribune Co. has announced that it will buy back stock from shareholders and return to a privately held company. The deal is being engineered by Chicago real estate billionaire tycoon Sam Zell who will be invest another $250 million and become a member of the board. It is not clear […]
Kathleen Parker, a syndicated columnist, writes about some irony regarding the newly published “Killed Cartoons” in which the publisher killed a 2002 cartoon by Doug Marlette depicting a jihadist driving a Ryder retnal truck with a nuclear bomb in the back with a caption that read: What Would Mohammad Drive? From her column: Editors and […]
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 […]
AAEC President Rob Rogers has scrapped the presidential campaign exhibit idea for this year’s 50th anniversary of the AAEC during their Washington D.C. convention. Instead, the exhibit will focus on the current presidential administration. Like Bill Clinton, I may have tried to do too much in my first 100 days as president (Ok, to be […]
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 […]
Tom Toles, Garry Trudeau, Dave Coverly have been tapped to judge the second annual “Science Idol” cartoon contest to draw humorous attention to political interference in science. The winner of the contest receives a 3-day trip to Washington D.C. and a lunch with Tom.From the press release: All artists, amateur or professional, are welcome to […]
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.