The Solano County/Fairfield (California) Daily Republic is adjusting to economic realities:It costs a great deal of money to report, write, illustrate, design and ultimately pull that local news and information together for each day’s print edition. The changes we have made – and continue to make – keep the focus on what’s local. As such, […]
Today’s Agnes is just plain silly, but it made me laugh because, I thought, there probably is a reason for the poofy hats, only I just looked it up and the reason, as I kind of suspected, is a combination of tradition, pretension and dubious folklore.But it put me in mind of the National Comedy […]
By the early 1960s Wally Wood was a known comic artist. His EC science fiction and MAD work was hailed. Early on he was good enough to draw Will Eisner’s The Spirit and spell Frank Frazetta on the Ace McCoy comic strip. His fantasy illustrations for pulps and his adventure sequences for the Valor comic […]
This coming weekend Gasoline Alley will celebrate its 100th anniversary, having first appeared November 24, 1918 in the Saturday edition of The Chicago Sunday Tribune.The writer-artist behind the ongoing strip today is Jim Scancarelli of Charlotte, N.C. He is just the fourth cartoonist to [sign] the comic. The North Michigan Christian Voice talks to Jim Scancarelli […]
A guest columnist at the Journal-Advocate of Sterling, Colorado, attempts to guilt Gary Larson into bringing “The Far Side” backFrom the column:For many in my generation, we relied upon Gary Larson to give us a daily inoculation against cynicism. Larson was cutting edge, but never mean spirited, and his ability to find the perfect phrase […]
Ed Hall is right, and so was I.The problem is climate change, but people are still seizing on the one remark in which Trump — for maybe the first time in his life — got something right.Still, as Hall notes, good forest management can’t overcome climate change, even if the nitwit who recommends it were […]
When did Mickey celebrate his third birthday? October 24, 1931. When did Mickey celebrate his fifth birthday? October 1, 1933. When was Mickey’s lucky seventh birthday…September 28th, 1935. When was Mickey’s 40th birthday in 1968? September 27th, 1968. As an installment of Jim’s Animation Anecdotes, animation and comics historian Jim Korkis, at Cartoon Research, sorts out […]
You may recall when Al Gore claimed that he invented the Internet and everyone giggled. It became a punchline, and Gore was branded a liar.Except that he hadn’t made the claim and, besides, he genuinely had been a significant sponsor of legislation to advance its development.And Vice President Dan Quayle, on a classroom visit, was […]
90 years ago Mickey Mouse became very popular due to his freewheeling attitude in the early cartoons. After a couple decades Mickey Mouse was tamed as he became the 1950s company image, and his popularity declined. Five years ago his early character was revived with a new series of shorts.You may have heard of these […]
This is the story of five kids and a mouse.It begins with a boy—Dan O’Neill, who, at 21, became one of the youngest syndicated cartoonists… Before long, he met up with 20-year-old Bobby London and 23 year-old Ted Richards at the Berkley Tribe… 25-year-old artist named Gary Hallgren, who at that time had been running […]
Kevin Siers References A Past Master Not news but I enjoyed Kevin Siers tribute to the famous Robert Minor cartoon and using it for a current situation. Ch-Ch-Ch-ChangesElsewhere someone takes a famous cartoonist’s old cartoon and changes it to please his own political ideology without so much as a fare-thee-well. Something that seems to be increasingly […]
I don’t expect a coherent theme to emerge today, so we’ll start with a Tank McNamara of great social significance and then see what’s next.I remember when, back well before the Internet or anything like it, the Sporting News would show up on the doorstep with its analysis of the most recent World Series game, […]
Bloomberg Opinion columnist Barry Ritholtz interviews American cartoonist Scott Adams, who captured the dysfunction of the modern workplace in his long-running comic strip “Dilbert.” Adams has also written several works of satire, commentary and business analysis, including “How to Fail at Almost Everything and Still Win Big: Kind of the Story of My Life” and […]
Jim “Sherman’s Lagoon” Toomey and University of Georgia Professor Samantha Joye have partnered to produce a kids’ film series on the importance of healthy oceans.From the story: “The Adventures of Zack and Molly” follows the story of a young man who is more interested in the small world of his smartphone than the larger world around […]
But first this …When I drop subtle hints that newspaper editors are cloth-eared, humorless dweebs who ought not to be in charge of selecting comics, here’s how it comes down elsewhere in the paper.Back in the days when papers had budgets, editors would have conventions where they’d make stupid collective decisions, like the time they […]