What better way to begin a conversation about sophomoric speculation than with a few sample panels from the newest installment of Existential Comics, which teams Camus, Sartre and de Beauvoir in a deeply meaningful, utterly ridiculous conversation about the futility of existence?The ongoing running gag in Existential Comics is a lampoon of those serious discussions […]
Frequent visitors to this blog know two things: One is that I don’t think much of awards and plaques and so forth. Too many subjective factors are involved and the main thing an award accomplishes is to impress employers and potential clients, and even that isn’t foolproof in this era of cloth-eared editors and short-sighted beancounters.The other […]
Friend of the Blog Ann Telnaes won the Reuben last night, or, more precisely, “the Reuben Award for Outstanding Cartoonist of the Year.” (The other awards are technically not “Reubens” though they all get called that.)And she deserved it. And, yes, I’m prejudiced.And isn’t it nice when personal prejudice is backed up by outrageously good […]
Pat Bagley picks up on a theme I’ve mentioned here a few times recently, which is that the spread of hostility and division began with the advent of talk radio when the FCC ended the Fairness Doctrine. A decade or so later, the Internet became user-friendly and ubiquitous enough that haters and borderline psychopaths could find […]
Soup to Nutz has grown considerably in the last few years. From a kind of standard “kids picking on each other” gag strip, Rick Stromoski has brought it into a strip where dumb kids say unintentionally smart things.Today’s strip is a good example, because I’m all in favor of NASA exploration.Not only is it cool, […]
Before I launch into today’s topic, a thanks to David Fitzsimmons for his depiction of the stupidest thing I’ve come across lately.I recently cut back my cable and got Roku to save a little money on the stations I actually wanted, and it’s changed my viewing habits such that I’ve been catching news on CNN […]
Let’s start the day today with an odd but so-far wonderful story arc at Retail.Several weeks ago, Marla’s insufferable assistant manager, Brice, accepted a job at Delman’s, the other department store anchor in the mall. The joke was that their boss, Stuart, had been about to offer him a management position elsewhere, but off he went […]
I often start the day with something silly, but I’ll reverse that to feature this Cartoon Movement piece by Agim Sulaj, an Albanian cartoonist currently living just across the street in Remini, Italy.”Perhaps if we listened to our children more, this world would be a better place,” he comments, and the fact that he doesn’t tie […]
Turkish cartoonist Halit Kurtulmus Aytoslu is not the only cartoonist to file a quick overnight response to the bombing at an Ariana Grande concert in Manchester last night.However, he makes the most profound statement, neither simply weeping nor raging in abstract defiance.There is in these moments the dichotomy Shakespeare described in Macbeth, when MacDuff learns his […]
Yes, that would be a good name for a band. Meanwhile, it’s also a good theme for the day, taken from Robert Burns’ classic poem about a prideful woman in church who doesn’t realize the people behind her are not admiring her fashionable beauty but watching a louse crawl around on her.Let’s start with a Juxtaposition: (Omar Al […]
As if to inflame a simmering controversey in the comments of a few days back, Paul Gilligan offers Poncho a choice of super powers and he picks one that would of course place him in the Alternate Comestible Universe, a series that Marvel will be launching next month.It consists of 12 variant editions released every week […]
I’m cheating: My rule is that a cartoon is fresh until it has been replaced, regardless of date of issue.This Clay Bennett cartoon actually ran a week ago, and, while there are several editorial cartoonists for whom a week-old cartoon remains “current,” Bennett is considerably more prolific than that.Nonetheless, if not “timely” under the rules […]
I’m not really assigning anything, but school has ended for my young writers in Colorado and I’m sure many of them were sent home with summer reading lists. I don’t like summer reading lists because, as I noted long ago, they are too often larded with classics the creator of the list hasn’t read and that make no sense. Or […]
I put this together the other day, upon the news that Trump had straight-out asked Comey to back off the investigation, but I’ll admit that, at the time, I didn’t actually foresee poor ol’ Sol being led to the car.Now, well … maybe Tom won’t get him off the hook. Maybe he won’t be able to, […]
The best part about that classic Geico commercial — aside from the number of times the camel says my name — is that, however annoying he may be, the people trying to ignore him are apparently locked into work they don’t enjoy. It’s not like he’s distracting them from something they want to be doing. Which means I […]