Today the Daily Cartoonist turns 1 years old. Cake and ice cream over at my house tonight!

A new Peanuts animated special will be aired on ABC in late November. The feature called Heâ??s a Bully, Charlie Brown and was the last animated project Charles Schulz worked on before his death in 2000.  The special is being produced by Lee Mendelson and Bill Melendez (the same individuals who have a long history of working on Charlie Brown animated movies and shows).

From the Tina’s Groove web site comes news that Tina’s Groove creator, Rina Piccolo, and her husband Brendan Burford (an editor at King Features) will be the featured speakers at the Museum of Comics and Cartoon Art on October 16th and will speak on the topic of comics and cartooning. For location and time, visit Rina’s web site.

Today marks 75 years since Dick Tracy appeared on the comics pages.  Several cartoonist are paying tribute. Here is a list of features that I’ve been able to find that mention, display or otherwise give homage to Chester Gould’s creation:

With news last week that Aaron McGruder’s The Boondocks is on a permanent hiatus, it will be interesting to see how quickly the roughly 100 subscribing newspapers drop The Boondocks reruns and pick a new feature….  Perhaps a question of greater interest is how many papers will replace The Boondocks with another strip that features predominately African-American or minority characters such as Candorville, or Watch Your Head.

Within the press release of Aaron McGruder’s news that The Boondocks’ hiatus may be permanent, is a little tidbit that Universal Press will be launching a new feature called Maintaining in January.  Maintaining is by Nate Creekmore, who developed the feature during college.  Nate is a two-time recipient of the Charles M. Schulz College Cartoonist Award in 2003 and in 2004 as well as best college cartoonist by the Associated Collegiate Press.  The feature is about a bi-racial high school student named Marcus. 

From an article in the Tennessean, we learn that the feature has been under a development contract for the last year.

You can see samples of Nate’s work on his web site.

Over on the AAEC web site is a good list of cartoon related events happening in the Baltimore area beginning October 12. Events include:

Small Press Expo featuring Matt Bors, Brian McFadden, August Pollak, Ted Rall, Mikhaela Reid, and Ben Smith.

International Comics Art Festival featuring Jules Feiffer and an exhibit of Herblock work.

Cartoons & Cocktails hosted by Mike Luckovich.

Exhibit of KAL at the Walters Art Museum in Baltimore (which I’ve talked about earlier).

For more information, including links to these events, visit the AAEC site.

Pulitzer Prize winning editorial cartoonist Joel Pett will be the featured speaker for the University of Kentucky Libararies’ Special Collection and Digital Programs Archives Week.  Archives Week (running the week of Oct. 9) is a celebration of 50 years of archiving Kentucky’s newspapers in their library.

Joel is expected to talk about his career and influences.

I read with interest the story posted last week regarding Doonesbury.com adding a blog to its site featuring entries from soldiers serving in Iraq and Afghanistan and then another story linked from Tom Spurgeon’s Comics Reporter about Garry’s decision to use his B.D. character as a way of highlighting the sacrifices soldiers are making overseas and it occurs to me that perhaps today, Garry Trudeau is our generation’s Bill Mauldin.

Chad Lowe has taken first place in editorial cartooning in the 2006 Florida Press Club Excellence in Journalism contest for the 90,000+ circulation category.  The awards will be presented to the winners on Oct. 21 in West Palm Beach.

I want to take a moment to thank Aaron Taylor for once again assuming the reins of the Daily Cartoonist to make sure news was posted everyday while I was away on vacation. I knew before I left that there would be some big announcements (like Boondocks not returning), and I equally knew that Aaron would catch it all and get it posted.

Thank you, again, Aaron.

I’m assuming that anyone who’d be interested in entering this competition is already informed of the coming deadline, but for the sake of complete coverage…The deadline for the National Press Foundation’s Berryman Award for Editorial Cartooning is this Friday (Oct. 6).

Open Season opened as the number one movie in America on it’s debut weekend.  According to “Movie Web,” Open Season grossed $23 million knocking Jackass Number Two to, well, number two and edging out new movies The Guardian and School for Scoundrels.Open Season’s executive producer is Steve Moore.

Nationally syndicated editorial cartoonist Daryl Cagle wrapped up his visit to Wabash College with a public lecture Thursday night, during which he talked about the craft of cartooning, the business of running a syndicate, and how, sooner or later, cartoonists make just about everybody angry.

As a fan of music, Charles Schulz named Pulitzer Prize-winning composer Ellen Taaffe Zwilich in a strip, which started a correspondance and inspired the composer to create music based on Peanuts characters. The latest performance is being recorded for PBS to air on stations in October.