Another Pulitzer Prize-winning editorial cartoonist has lost his position with his newspaper. Steve Breen, cartoonist for The San Diego Union-Tribune, will no longer be a regular presence at the newspaper. Says Steve in a farewell column: By Steve Breen Editorial Cartoonist July 21, 2023 5:49 PM PT Today marks the last time I will have […]
(Scott Stantis)(Bill Bramhall)When I heard Tony Bennett had died, I thought it was too bad, but, then again, he was 96 years old, at which point you’ve got the right to check out. I was confident that political cartoonists would be all over the topic, obituary cartoons being something that editors can understand and thus […]
The 2023 Eisner Award winners were announced at the San Diego Comic Con. Below are a few of the winners that have comic strip connections and a couple others. Best WebcomicWINNER: Lore Olympus, by Rachel Smythe (WEBTOON) Best Publication for Early Readers (up to age 8)WINNER: The Pigeon Will Ride the Roller Coaster! by Mo […]
Editor’s Note: As part of the continued evolution of our business and due to changing reader habits, McClatchy will no longer publish daily opinion cartoons, including on the Herald-Leader’s Opinion page. The Herald-Leader has been proud to publish the work of Pulitzer Prize winner Joel Pett, who has contributed timely, thought-provoking, accountability-focused work to these […]
Alex offers a grim prediction for writers, or at least those who don’t go to the right cocktail parties in the right cities.Publishers already use the term “slush pile” for the vast quantities of unsolicited manuscripts that arrive on their doorsteps, and it’s newsworthy when something from the slush pile gets published. It’s nearly newsworthy […]
The 2024 season of KPBS’ Comics culture has kicked off by interviewing Heathcliff cartoonist Peter Gallagher.Famed for weirdness, Peter discusses how the weirdness must be a natural occurrence, not forced. Also Peter talks of cartoonists block, his preference to physical (pen and paper) over digital, his love of being able to draw backgrounds in the […]
Ill health took a toll on Walt Kelly and Pogo. By the early 1970s friends and family were pitching in more and more hoping the creator would recover enough to return to the strip full time. That, alas, did not happen. In 1973 Walt Kelly died. So widow Selby Kelly with Don Morgan, Henry Shikuma, […]
The political scene is incredibly toxic, with Ron DeSantis and his merry band of supremacists creating an astonishing false reality with which to program the next generation. However, both George Wallace and Dr. MacLeod have jumped on this outrageous lie. I’ve got nothing to add except to thank them: We need decent people to speak […]
In places like New York City, papers were sold to the masses at a penny a copy. Thus this era is called the Penny Press. It’s also the era of what was called Yellow Journalism. The term arose out of a battle between newspaper barons Joseph Pulitzer and William Randolph Hearst about a comic strip […]
Tom Tomorrow poses an interesting question: Should the mainstream media give coverage to foolish, hateful propaganda?Nobody would likely care about transgender issues if the rightwing hadn’t ginned it up and turned it into a major political matter. In the real world, it only impacts a very small percentage of the population and their friends and […]
A recent list of “10 Great But Forgotten 1990s Newspaper Comic Strips” includes current comics Zits, Mutts, Non Sequitur, Sherman’s Lagoon, Tom the Dancing Bug, and Agnes. Six of the ten 1990s comic strips tagged forgotten are still appearing in newspapers today. Their greatness can be debated (I see more than half as qualifying), but […]
King Features Syndicate “announced a master publishing partnership with Mad Cave Studios to develop a full line of new narratives, comics reprints and graphic novels starring its iconic hero Flash Gordon. The initial Flash Gordon stories are slated to be released in 2024.” Read the news of the licensing agreement here. Under this partnership, expect […]
(photo: NBC)With all due respect, they got it wrong. When Cheers was taken over by a corporation, they brought in Rebecca Howe and she was the boss and eventually Sam bought the bar back and he was back in charge.Well, it was a comedy after all. In the real world, as in the show, Sam […]
That’s comic, I say comic strippin’ the Comic Con, son. Tom Batiuk and Dan Davis, both veterans of comic conventions, began preparing for the San Diego Comic Con last week as all true comic fans did. Sunday got the Crankshaft co-stars in their costumes and today to The Con. Tom and Dan are responsible for […]
The Associated Press drops the story of McClatchy ridding themselves of political cartoons and cartoonists. Here, via the Voice of America, is the AP article by David Bauder: The firings of the cartoonists employed by the McClatchy newspaper chain last week were a stark reminder of how an influential art form is dying, part of […]