I don’t check political cartoons on Friday, so I don’t know if this exploded over the past 24 or 48 hours, but suddenly a bunch of conservative cartoonists like Gary Varvel (Creators) are worried that Joe Biden will hand us all over to Communist China.“Communist China” being a term suddenly come into vogue after several […]
Keith Knight, Tove Jansson, Charles Addams, Matt Groening, Aaron MacGruder, Edward Gorey, E. H. Shepard, Liz Montague, and others. Finnish illustrator Tove Jansson spent many summers at a remote mökki (cottage), enjoying idyllic moments that would later make their way into the stories of her famous comic strip, The Moomins. Cartoonist Keith Knight’s The K […]
The end of the year brings out the “Best of” lists.Some of which contains items that we have mentioned here.The Beat‘s list of the 50 best comics of 2020 includes titles by seasoned creators and up-and-coming talents. Forbes has put out their list of The Best Graphic Novels of 2020. Polygon has a different view of The […]
Harry Bliss, who lives about 20 miles south of here, cites 40 inches of snow from yesterday’s morning dump, and I got a laff over his having bought JD Salinger’s home and then joking about having to dig himself out.Salinger wasn’t a hermit — he came into town and was sociable enough — but he […]
Mike Morgan refers to his nearly 30-year career as author and illustrator of the “For Heaven’s Sake!” comic strip as his “advocation to go with vocation” as senior pastor at Gainesville First United Methodist Church. Morgan’s “For Heaven’s Sake!” was first published in the Faith and Values section of The Macon Telegraph in [September] 1991. […]
Some of you may have noticed that some of us have an obsession with Firsts and Lasts. So when we presented the first Newspaper Enterprise Association Christmas strip from 1936 last week, our goal was to bookend that with the last NEA Christmas strip.In January 2009 cartoonist Dan Thompson got Rip Haywire, his parody of/homage […]
Historical looks at The Ungentlemanly Art from the past week.Illustrating Propaganda During World War I If the echoes of fascism have brought the 1930s and ‘40s troublingly to mind, it’s worth recalling that modern propaganda became a global enterprise during the First World War, rather than the second. For the US, that conflict was brief, […]
Clay Jones (Ind) strikes the right note on the ridiculous question of whether people deserve the titles they’ve earned.Spoiler: Yes.Plenty of people have noted that the term “dottore” was applied to educators before it was applied to physicians. For that matter, it was applied to educators before there was such a thing as a Phd […]
Darrin Bell goes back almost 30 years to his old Cal Berkeley rootswith a special comic strip that takes us back nearly 2,000 years. Apparently an excerpt from a Stan Kelly cartoon has become a popular meme. Kelly has a very black-and-white view of the world. The color black, if you look through the cartoons, is […]
Below are some comic strip and cartoon books scheduled for December 2020 release. Images and links (mostly) via Amazon, though ordering through your local comic or independent book store is a good idea. Invisible Men: The Trailblazing Black Artists of Comic Books – review Barnaby Volume Four Max and the Midknights: Battle of the Bodkins […]
A roundup of recent news items.Tomversation, Humor for a Sheltered World© Tom FalcoThe Miami Herald highlights Tom Falco‘s contribution to making the pandemic a bit more bearable. When the pandemic started, Tom Falco got back to drawing comics. On May 4, he began publishing them online through “Tomversation,” which he subtitled “The real world. Just […]
I realize it’s a case of “damning with faint praise,” but Mike Luckovich (AJC) offers the best of a bunch of happy cartoons praising the rollout of the Covid vaccine, which is a demonstration of Tolstoy’s opening of Anna Karenina that “All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.”That’s […]
Desirée N. Santos has earned the Girl Scouts Gold Award for her Emma webcomic.The Gold Award is the highest achievement within the Girl Scouts of the USA. From NJ Advance Media: Desirée N. Santos, a resident of Cranford and a Lifetime member of the Girl Scouts of Cranford (Service Unit 48), recently received official approval […]
Sports cartoonist Pierre “Peb” Bellocq has been honored by the racing world.From the Daily Racing Form:Pierre “Peb” Bellocq, the most famous racing caricaturist of all time, [has] been selected for inclusion in the National Museum of Racing’s Joe Hirsch Media Roll of Honor, the Saratoga Springs museum announced on Monday. Bellocq, who has been known […]
I like Walt Handelsman (Times-Picayune)‘s cartoon, and I enjoyed the celebratory posts on social media yesterday as the electoral votes came in from the various states, sealing the Biden victory and spelling an end to . . .Well, an end to what?Along with confirmation of the election results came news that Bill Barr has decided […]