Lio may be on the right track.One advantage of a parliamentary system is that elections can be called anytime but then they only last a few weeks.Yes, Brexit went on — has gone on — forever, but that’s an exception.Under a parliamentary system, the Democrats and Republicans would each choose a party leader and then […]
James Thurber‘s first drawings appeared in the The New Yorker dated ninety years ago today.In the New Yorker issue dated February 22, 1930 a short James Thurber contribution included two illustrations, the first Thurber drawings to appear in the magazine.[James Thurber’s words first appeared in the February 26, 1927 New Yorker, but since prose and […]
The Society of Illustrators has announced their 2020 Hall of Fame Laureates. Among this year’s inductees are a couple with comics backgrounds. 2020 Hall of Fame Inductee: Jean Henri Gaston Giraud (Mœbius)French artist, writer, and cartoonist Jean Henri Gaston Giraud garnered worldwide acclaim under the pseudonyms Mœbius and Gir. Born in the suburbs of Paris in […]
Snoopy (Peanuts Workdwide LLC) tweeted out a message to Franklin this morning and then quickly deleted it as some found it offensive (racist).The tweet was deleted so quickly that Truth or Fiction took it up, explaining the trouble:The phrase “You’re one of the good ones” is a backhanded compliment often proffered in racist or misogynist […]
We’ll lead off today with aJuxtaposition of the Day(Retail)(Rob Rogers)Transposed like this, the connection between the penultimate Retail strip and Rob Rogers’ piece of Bill Barr is more obvious than I expected it to be.Back in the glory days of PBS, Ebert & Siskel used to criticize what they called an Idiot Plot, defined as […]
Cartoonist Nicola Cuti has passed away.Nicola (Nick) Cuti October 29, 1944 – February 21, 2020 News of Nick’s passing was made public on his Facebook page:Legendary comic creator Nicola Cuti, whose career has spanned over fifty years, has died. Sources close to the family have reported that Cuti passed in Tampa on Friday, February 21, 2020, […]
Arlo plays the old gaffer yet again.I was going to make a joke about how “Seven O’Clock Straight Up” means “without ice,” but, then again, we’re living in a world where people assume a martini is made with vodka.And I grew up in a world in which not only is a martini, by definition, made […]
When I opened my annual “American Association of Editorial Cartoonists Notebook”, our trade journal, the bell tolled for my profession, page by page, cartoonist by cartoonist. The Golden Age of Oliphant, MacNelly and Paul Conrad is long gone. This year our annual AAEC convention will convene in Ottawa with our Canadian colleagues because our numbers […]
Ed Hall offers a commentary on an item from Dear Leader’s budget, which eliminates funding for Stars and Stripes, the newspaper that has kept the military informed since the Civil War, operating out of the Department of Defense but with full First Amendment rights and a separate congressional ombudsman to protect them.It is, of course, […]
Lincoln Peirce‘s multimedia success (popular comic strip, best selling comic collections and illustrated novels, musical theatre) is now getting a Nickolodeon animated series.Animation Magazine reports:On Wednesday, Nickelodeon detailed its new, wide-ranging content slate for 2020-21, with a brand-new book-inspired animated series amid several live-action originals… Greenlit for 26 episodes, Big Nate is an all-new animated […]
Steve Sack offers a bit of good old country comfort from the frozen north, as a way of breaking the Democratic logjam.Logjams being a hazard Minnesotans learned to deal with generations ago and country matters being where the Democrats dropped the ball in 2016.And “Hot Dish” being a Minnesota tradition at church dinners and such […]
The National Cartoonists Society has announced that Jim Davis, creator of Garfield, the most widely syndicated comic strip in the world, will be a guest speaker at their 2020 Reubens weekend:A previous Reuben-winner, Jim will be speaking at the NCS conference on Friday, 5th June at the Marriott Kansas City Downtown. His exclusive talk for the NCS “The […]
MAD #12 comes out tomorrow and does not contain NEW material from Dick DeBartolo. That ends a streak going back to the June 1966 dated MAD and lasting to the February 2020 dated MAD, encompassing 459 issues!As Tom Richmond notes:It’s also very much worth noting that this issue of MAD magazine is the first one […]
At Boing Boing Rusty Blazenhoff writes of rejection. Specifically Drew Dernavich and his pile of cartoons rejected by The New Yorker.…That search led me to Brooklyn-based Drew Dernavich (and, boy, I sure am glad I found him!). On top of The New Yorker, he’s been published in Time, the Wall Street Journal, Harvard Business Review, […]
Tom Toles expresses some impatience with the public’s willingness to ignore what’s going on around it.Granted, ostriches do not, in fact, stick their heads in the sand and imagine that they are hidden.We do, however, and, as Toles suggests, we not only do it, but we do it wonderfully well. We also do it unpredictably. When […]