Industry news for the professional cartoonist
Let’s start with some nonsense. The Walt Disney Company is about to do the unthinkable: retire Mickey Mouse. Inside the Magic reports that Disney is bringing The Wonderful World of Mickey Mouse animated shorts to an end with tribute to The Mouse’s first short Steamboat Willie: Since 2020, Mickey Mouse has starred in the animated…
-> Celebration of Life and Cartooning SIOUX FALLS, SD (KELO) — In less than a month from now, people will gather in Sioux Falls to celebrate the life of Hagar the Horrible cartoonist Chris Browne, who died earlier this year at the age of 70. Browne’s death came on the 50th anniversary of the comic…
Oz Black. Plus Thomas Nast, Paul Conrad, Ted Rall, Bill Bramhall, Ann Telnaes, Herblock, Zapiro, Edmund Duffy, Barry Blitt and more Here in Lincoln by Oz Oswald Ragan “Oz” Black studied art at the University of Nebraska from 1918 to 1923. He went on to document local news 365 days a year for nearly four…
A Look at the Future from the 200 Years Ago What did the future look like in 1820s Britain? Poking fun at liberal ambitions for education reform, the rapid pace of industrialization, and a fashionable interest in applied knowledge, William Heath’s March of Intellect series offered a satirical vision of the wonders and potential cost…
Editorial cartoonist Rick McKee opined on the new Artificial Intelligence use of creating art works and cartoon images by utilizing an AI software application to help create his most recent cartoon. Rick explained on Facebook: I generated the bulk of this cartoon using MidJourney, a text-to-image generating AI. After many failed attempts and lots of…
Broom-Hilda by Russell Myers © Tribune Content Agency When The Far Side Went Too Far? According to a 2019 interview with Larson in the New York Times, Larson revealed that he had numerous moments where he was going to be pulled from newspapers by controversy, but one stuck out in his mind the most….
According to comic book historians who keep track of such things, Animal Comics #1 from Dell Publishing was released 80 years ago today. Its claim to fame is that the comic book featured the debut of Pogo Possum and Albert the Alligator by Walt Kelly. The occupants of Okefenokee were not birthed fully formed,…
In 16 months Mickey Mouse‘s official debut* animated cartoon, Steamboat Willie, will go public domain, but The Mouse will remain very much a Disney property. © Disney The iconic character that has come to define the entire Disney brand made his first appearance as the title character in 1928’s Steamboat Willie, which will lapse into…
With content by cream-of-the-crop illustrators like Hal Foster, Frank Godwin, James Montgomery Flagg, F. R. Gruger, William Meade Prince, and Creig Flessel and such best-selling authors as William Saroyan, Daphne de Maurier, Sinclair Lewis, Franz Werfel, Ayn Rand, and Erle Stanley Gardner, it’s a wonder King Features Syndicate’s Book-of-the-Month comic strip isn’t better known today….
E. E. Cummings was one of the Kat’s biggest fans. In 1922, he wrote from Paris to request clippings from friends in America. (“Thank you moreover for a Kat of indescribable beauty!” he wrote to an obliging friend.) In his 1946 introduction to the first edition of the collected strips, Cummings wrote that the brick…
Announcing the 2022 Davenport International Cartoon Contest! A festival that honors a famous Political Cartoonist seems almost naked without some kind of competition focused on that endeavor. To that end, the International Cartoon Contest has returned! Also, since we have not changed either our entry fees or our prizes in over 30 years, we have…
The modern day swamp creature began with Theodore Sturgeon’s 1940 short story “It.” It would be adapted as a Marvel comic book decades later. A couple years after It The Heap appeared in Hillman comic books. The Heap would be revived in 1971 by Skywald Publications. In the years spanning the 1940s and…
Publishers Weekly is reporting that Less than a year after settling a lawsuit with Dr. Seuss Enterprises, ComicMix is launching a Kickstarter campaign to fund the publication of The Zaks and Other Lost Stories by Theodor Geisel, aka Dr. Seuss, to be released in July. The stories, which are in the public domain and available…
In 1926 Newspaper Enterprise Association (NEA) began a series of stories about American heroes. These were brief one week (six daily comic strips) biographies about famous historical figures such as Nathan Hale, Molly Pitcher, George Custer, Betsy Ross, and others. Then they broke the mold by doing a two week (12 day) life story…
Cartoon Exhibit [E]ditorial cartoons [will be] exhibited at the University of Tennessee’s Downtown Gallery beginning Wednesday, January 26 through Saturday, February 26. The Downtown Gallery exhibit is called Point of View: Regional Editorial Cartoons. This exhibition is in conjunction with A Serious Look at the Funnies, an exhibition at the Ewing Gallery of Art…