Eric Jaffe explores the idea that humans are hardwired for the visual language of comics.Language is more than just a series of words strung together. A sentence must have some essential structure, some system of rules governing words and clauses–a grammar. You don’t have to be Strunk or White to recognize this system at work; […]
Augusta Chronicle editorial cartoonist Rick McKee has been named as this year’s United Nations/Ranan Lurie Political Cartoon Award winner. The prize comes with a nifty $10,000. Rick is the third American to win the award.Congratulations, Rick!
From Buzzfeed: Shia LaBeouf posted his new short film HowardCantour.com online on Monday, having first debuted the work at the May 2012 Cannes Film Festival. The piece stars Jim Gaffigan as an online film critic named Howard Cantour, and it is almost a direct adaptation of Justin M. Damiano, a 2007 comic written and drawn […]
So the Benghazi-of-the-Week is that Phil Robertson of Duck Dynasty expressed some neolithic views of sexuality and some jaw-dropping observations about pre-Civil Rights America and A&E exercised their right to not feature him on their channel.Jonathan Rosenberg makes about the only necessary comment on the “scandal” itself. What makes it a “Benghazi” is the tortuous inconsistencies […]
On the wake of the Ohio State University Festival of Comic art comes the announcement that two new courses on the topic of comics will be offered in the spring. The classes are offered through the English department and are entitled, “Pictures That Tick ? Difficult History in Comics” and “Comics & Time”.From the description […]
Earlier this month I posted a video by Kyle Lambert drawing a hard-to-believe-it’s-not-real portrait of Morgan Freeman on his iPad with the ProCreate app. It set off a lot of debate on the validity of the work. I’ve been following ProCreate on Twitter. They say they’ve evaluated the source file and say it’s the read […]
I ran into Steve Artley at the Billy Ireland last month and told him I wished he hadn’t quit doing political cartoons about a year earlier, to which he responded that I was in luck, because he was starting back up again. And so he has.A boatload of cartoonists have done Scrooge cartoons this holiday […]
Dilbert creator Scott Adams and Pearls Before Swine creator Stephan Pastis did a video for Wacom on the topic of analog vs. digital.
My apologies for the prolonged downtime over the weekend and earlier this week. The blog began having issues last Thursday and became more pronounced Friday and into the weekend. The site couldn’t stay up for more than 15 minutes. Support from my hosting company was underwhelming and frankly useless. I spent far too much time […]
It’s not that I’m in a non-ranting mood. I’m always in the mood for a rant.But there were a lot of cartoons that I really liked today but none that triggered a rant. Or, at least, not a full-length rant. So treasure the brevity. Let’s start with some football. The Flying McCoys today isn’t about football, but I […]
My day begins around 4:30 with a dive into the day’s cartoons, during which I pull out, on average, a half dozen nominees. Then I go back and sort through them to come up with some sort of coherent overall theme or, at least, a sensible order in which to discuss them.So today I had […]
This week’s sponsor of The Daily Cartoonist is John Rose, the cartoonist behind Barney Google and Snuffy Smith. Barney Google and Snuffy Smith was one of the strips that ran in my hometown paper growing up. I have fond memories of laying down on the floor in front of the fireplace reading all of the […]
Today’s Argyle Sweater may provoke cheering as well as laughter from an apparently growing group that despises the “Elf on the Shelf,” a relatively new, manipulative way to drive home the message that love is dependent on your behavior.That’s always been part of the non-religious aspect of Christmas: He knows if you’ve been bad or good, […]
Today’s headline is a tribute to my favorite journalistic weasel-word.However, it fits. The Christmas cartoons are starting, which will, for the next two weeks, mean the comics page will be an eclectic mix of good stuff and really lame stuff. We’ll celebrate the good. Some of which is political, of course. Steve Sack isn’t the first […]
I have always had a visceral dislike for prolonged, outward mourning. In recent years, it has come from seeing how often a “commemorative issue” is no more than a cynical mask for piling up some single copy sales, but even as a 13-year-old nearing 14, I went outside and ran around the yard during JFK’s […]