Of the two-score-minus-one comic strips Mike Peterson displayed from 1948 seven are still being syndicated with new content in 2023. None of which will be highlighted in this post. Which is not to say some oldies won’t be here. The Phantom was around then and is now. At the risk of stepping on the toes […]
My goodness but 1948 was a fabulous year for cartoons! We were emerging from the war and feeling pretty good, but not yet arrogant, about ourselves. And newspapers still featured things like cartoons that their readers wanted. Fancy that!As a result, this will be a longer than usual posting, and I hope you enjoy it! […]
From The New York Daily News via Yahoo: Brooklyn: As a lifelong animal lover who is always entertained by your comic “Mutts,” I am greatly disturbed by your recent cartoon depicting a bull dog chained to a post and left alone by his owner. I thought comics were supposed to bring a smile to my […]
Dan Piraro/Bizarro; Tom Tomorrow/This Modern WorldA message from Dan Piraro: IN JANUARY, 2024, CHANGES ARE COMING TO RANCHO BIZARRO that we hope you’ll enjoy, or at least won’t make you puke! Have you ever spent the majority of your life weaving a beautiful rug only to have it pulled out from under you by a […]
Existential Comics, which just celebrated its tenth year, continues the birthday festivities with this contrast of Jean-Jacques Rousseau and Thomas Hobbes. It’s not a ground-breaking comparison. I think most courses in political science that delve in classical sources make a point of having students read, and discuss, both men, as we did in college. But […]
Cartoonist Bill Lee has passed away. William Saul (Bill) Lee November 15, 1938 – November 15, 2023 From the New York Times notice: He attended the School of Visual Arts, which prepared him for his career as cartoonist and cartoon editor for General Media. The self-described “Investigative Cartoonist” won awards throughout his life, and his […]
A lot of things have changed in the past day or two, and I’m covering myself by starting with this handy flowchart from Joy of Tech, because Sam Altman was fired as head of Open AI and then hired by Microsoft and then a bunch of people at Open AI threatened to quit and then […]
Back in “the good old days” of the adventurous decade daily comic strips ran, more than less, four panels wide. World War Two with its material reductions basically ended that and by the 1950s three panels became the norm. These days two panels seem more common than three for adventure and other continuity strips. And […]
This is apt to be a tough week for finding outstanding comics, given the flood of Roz-at-the-Pearly-Gates pieces already flooding the zone, plus the mandatory Thanksgiving cartoons. Nothing against Roz, mind you. Great gal. But I can’t imagine anyone breaking any new ground and, so far, I haven’t seen anything surprising or worth featuring here. […]
It has been a week or so since the brouhaha of the Michael Ramirez editorial cartoon that appeared in The Washington Post that brought accusations of racism and and led to the newspaper pulling the cartoon. Since then Michael has responded with interviews and the right-wing has been all-in for bashing the liberal Post. But […]
This morning’s news of a potential American-negotiated pause in the fighting in Gaza, plus a release of prisoners, puts a lot of current political cartoons on shaky grounds, but adds some punch to Ward Sutton‘s mashup of the Biden campaign and the Golden Bachelor TV show.Which is to say that he hasn’t brought peace to […]
It was around this time last year when Comics Kingdom introduced us to the Alex Segura and Nickolej Villiger comic strip Mara Llave: Keeper of Time. After getting a great start the rumor was that actual paying gigs put Mara Llave on the back burner. Now after catching up (and maybe doing some fine tuning?) […]
I’ve long since stopped featuring Santos/Pinocchio cartoons, since there were too many of them and they’d lost all impact. But I got a laugh out of Ed Hall‘s combining of the metaphor with the common “spend more time with my family” excuse. In fact, that lame explanation is as too frequent and as devoid of […]
The Society of Illustrators announced William Joyce and Dahlov Ipcar winners of Lifetime Achievement Awards. The Lifetime Achievement Awards were established in 2005 by past chairs of The Original Art. Nominees must be judged to have a body of work that documents an innovative and pioneering contribution to the field of children’s book illustration, and […]
Mike Peterson has mentioned the episode a few times, at the bottom of this column, at the top here, and toward the middle of this post. But here is Clive Goddard, chairman of the UK’s Professional Cartoonists’ Organisation (PCO), telling it: Back in July 2023 cartoons hit the headlines for all the wrong reasons. The […]