Bennett’s day-after cartoon would have been easy to nit-pick a year or so ago, because half of us wanted the exchange immediately while half of us were pleased, so using Uncle Sam would have been unfair.However, waking up on Boxing Day to find that he bombed another country and then spewed about 150 screwy messages […]

Recommended Reading, Public Domain 2026, Cartoonist Writes, Recommended Reading PEN America has released the Longlists for their 2026 Literary Awards The PEN/Jacqueline Bograd Weld Award for Biography is awarded for excellence in the art of biography. The only comics-related book on the various lists is Dan Nadel‘s Crumb: A Cartoonists Life. Filled with comics is […]

As Linda Matchan of The Boston Globe tells it (or here): Peter Hotton, a beloved editor at The Boston Globe for half a century and the writer of a popular column, was a newspaperman of the old school. Hotton loved Globe history. He loved old news photos. He loved bringing his kids to Morrissey Boulevard […]

December 25, 1975* — Older Strips # — Special Materials

In 1952, a year after Associated Press Newsfeatures delivered the six part The Story of Santa Claus to newspapers, they brought out the six part Behind the Christmas Story. Again drawn by AP art director Ed Gunder and probably (there is no proof) written by AP correspondent Sherry Bowen who had written AP’s The Story […]

Nancy is one of a handful of ongoing comic strips that can trace its origins back to over a hundred years, the others include Gasoline Alley, Ripley’s Believe It or Not, Barney Google and Snuffy Smith, and Popeye.*So naturally those comics pass into other cartoonists’ hands over time. That time has come for Nancy.GoComics’ latest […]

We’ll let Mads Horwath reply to all the strips in which kids try to be good in the week before Christmas, hoping to make up for 51 weeks of normal behavior. The idea of Santa Claus rewarding good children and punishing bad children goes back a long way, and I have to hope that not […]

Leman No More From Balkan Insight: For 40 years the weekly satirical magazine Leman was published in Turkey. But on June 26, a cartoon appeared depicting Gaza under fire and featuring two figures named Muhammed and Musa [Moses]. Five employees were arrested; the editor-in-chief could not be, however, as he was abroad. Meanwhile, prison sentences ranging […]

I bought my fair share of mass market paperbacks (mmpb) in my youth: classics, science fiction, detective, World War Two, and, of course, comicbacks. These books have declined in sales and will be much harder to find as Readerlink, the largest distributor in North America, is reportedly stopping distribution of them at the end of the […]

There’s a lot to like in this cartoon, starting with the dim lighting that counters the bold bragging about a golden age most people aren’t seeing, and the absolute normalness of the woman and child who walk past the shouting speech, getting on with lives that are neither wretched nor glorious.We see the stories of […]

“The Arc of the Moral Universe is Long, But it Bends Toward Justice.” – Martin Luther King, Jr. Well it is certainly taking its time, we’ll see which way it leans.From Ryan Hooper, Daily Mail Crime Correspondent: The former leader of the British National Party (BNP) has appeared in court charged with two counts of […]

“The joy of Dilbert: Scott Adams brightened our lives by mocking everyday indignities” James Bovard of The New York Post writes a eulogy for the still-living Scott Adams: Scott Adams, the cartoonist who gave the world “Dilbert,” is suffering mightily in the final throes of cancer. After he departs this vale of tears, his glorious […]

‘If seven maids with seven mopsSwept it for half a year,Do you suppose,’ the Walrus said,‘That they could get it clear?’‘I doubt it,’ said the Carpenter,And shed a bitter tear.As noted here the other day, there has been a prodigious amount of black ink spilled on cartoons since the non-release of the Epstein files, but […]

We’ve fallen behind on noting Alex Garcia’s Inside the Kingdom interviews; so… Finding the Funny in the Everyday: Hilary Price and Rhymes With Orange What makes a comic quietly brilliant? In this episode of Inside the Kingdom, we sit down with Hilary Price, the award-winning creator of Rhymes With Orange. Since 1995, Hilary’s strip has […]

The top tier of Jeff Mallett‘s treatise on Christmas traditions in today’s Frazz hits on the American Santa Claus as a long-standing part of Yuletide season, ending with Thomas Nast‘s personification of the elflord.The Birth of a Holiday and the American Santa ClausYesterday Talmadge Boston for The Dallas Morning News told us the story of […]