In today’s Between Friends, Kim asks a question that all writers — and creative people in general — face, or, at least, ought to. The key is not what people want to read but what you want to say.It’s not that hard to see what is popular but there is that old Hollywood gag that what […]

Chip Bok makes a valid point about Jeff Sessions’ recent decision to crack down on pot: He’s the Attorney General and he should be enforcing the law. You can’t blame him for the fact that federal law has not kept up with social trends or science or medicine.Though at that point the argument divides.Bok is […]

Leading with Mike Thompson’s cartoon because he takes advantage of one of the most astonishing press briefings to emerge from an astonishing White House.In case you missed it, that insufferable teacher’s pet that Dear Leader puts in charge when he leaves the room explained the objection to “Fire and Fury” thus:“The president believes in making […]

 The book drops today, and if you love me you’ll order it here but that’s not what I wanted to say about it.Jack Ohman comes close to what I wanted to say about it, because it’s a portrait of chaos and paranoia that would be funny if it weren’t actually happening in our actual government.I’ve […]

There was never a time when I didn’t enjoy my boys or wished they had stayed young or wished they would get over a particular stage.But today’s Dog Eats Doug brings back what may be my favorite parenting period: When they were old enough to sit up in the grocery cart and take notice, but […]

I keep hoping for things to lighten up enough that we can just share some giggles. However, the rant is necessary because we’ve got a coalition of maniacs and morons to deal with.Drew Sheneman offers an insightful comment on the street protests in Iran: A moderate (note the street clothes) Iranian attempting to confront a […]

Rudy Park scores the only “Last Jedi” mention here for a couple of reasons, starting with my only caring about the film as a social factor and not as a motion picture.I have not seen it and almost certainly won’t, not because I’m the kind of snob who avoids popular films but because of the […]

It’s always fun and instructive, on New Year’s Day, to look back at how cartoonists have dealt with similar times in the past, and I chose New Year’s 1969 because it followed a year that was about as bad as any we’ve had since the Civil War.Here’s a quick summary of what we’d just been […]

I’ve been kind of sitting on this Steve Breen cartoon for a few days because I didn’t know quite what to say about it.Beyond, “What is the matter with you people?”The complicated part is that, while everyone seems to either be ignoring the threat or appears untroubled by it, that could be part of the […]

Sally Forth is hardly the only comic strip riffing on middle-aged people trying to stay up for New Year’s, but it may be the only one riffing on the pointlessness of even bothering. The last time I made midnight I was in my 50s and it was only by happenstance: I’d been working on something and […]

The thoughts I wrote about on youth and writing yesterday had been bouncing around for a few weeks, but came into focus when I read JP Trostle’s “Nautilus,” a graphic memoir of his mother’s death and the extended mountain of stuff she left behind.It was a moment of “Yes – this is what I mean!”This […]

Let’s ease into the day with a Nick Anderson cartoon pointing out something we all knew: The man is a pathological liar.Permit me to elaborate:There are people like OJ Simpson or Jeff MacDonald who, under the severe stress of horror, respond by creating an alternative reality. That’s lying in the sense of telling a story […]

Drew Sheneman leads off by confronting the notion that lowering taxes will encourage reinvestment in a business.It seems like utter nonsense, but it’s at least a debatable economic theory.As long as we leave out logic, history and human nature.What is not debatable is the fakery of speeches from Dear Leader declaring that companies which have […]

No, Carmen, you didn’t.And be careful what you wish for anyway.It seems odd to be coming back from a day that was not only full of three-dimensional real-world distractions but in which even Facebook, that repository of confrontational misinformation, had turned for the moment into family photos and warmth.It was a pleasant respite, but coffee break’s […]

How old fashioned? This old fashioned. My dad made Christmas cards each year back before a whole lot of technical advances, and here is the plate from his 1951 card to prove it. If you mouse over it, you’ll see that I slugged it “cut” because that’s what graphics were referred to back in the […]