I had been looking forward to the 250th anniversary of our Declaration of Independence, but it seems to be falling flat, and Anderson pinpoints the issue. It doesn’t seem to be widely known, but there are two very different groups set up for the commemoration: America250 is a non-partisan group set up by Congress to […]
Envisioning Consumer Culture: Comic Strips, Comic Books, and Advertising in America, 1890 – 1945 by Ian Gordon In the late nineteenth century American newspaper owners and comic strip artists transformed European traditions of visual humor and graphic narrative into a new commercial form of leisure, the Sunday color comic strip. These strips focused on continuing […]
Last weekend the Doug Wright Awards at the Toronto Comic Arts Festival. The awards recognizes excellence in the field of Canadian comics. Below are the the 2026 winners. For full full list of nominees, read our prior coverage.Best BookCannon, Lee Lai (Drawn & Quarterly)The Nipper (Emerging Talent)Lis Xu for Layover & Mad (Self-published) and Raccoon Rescue […]
The Australian Press Council (APC) has ruled that a Cathy Wilcox cartoon published in The Age and The Sydney Morning Herald in January of this year showing Australian leaders being directed by Benjamin Netanyahu overstepped the bounds of the Council’s standards. From Natasha Lee at Media Week: The Australian Press Council has found The Age […]
Garry Trudeau didn’t plan on being a cartoonist. But he quickly became one of the most influential cartoonists in modern cartooning with his comic Doonesbury. Launched in 1970, Doonesbury quickly became a must-read for fans, politicians, and journalists. In the new Trudeau biography, Joshua Kendall writes, “at the annual dinner of the Radio and Television […]
We’ve seen a plethora of Timmy-in-the-Well cartoons, despite the fact that, while Timmy had a whole lot of scrapes, that wasn’t one of them. However, the jokes have replaced the reality to the point where Jon Provost’s biography is titled Timmy’s in the Well. It’s like that old saying, “It ain’t what you don’t know […]
While I haven’t delved deeply into the history books I do think that the past seven days saw a record. Within a week, six days actually, four different cartoonists signed the Ripley’s Believe It or Not cartoon feature. For June 1-4, 2026 there was the mononymous DeJoy signing the panel. June 5-6, 2026 saw the […]
A roundup of stories tangentially connected to comic strips. A history of the Jeep that brings to mind Mort Walker’s army, a non-cartoonist barber creating comic strip promo with a.i., a real cartoonist who has moved on to using skin as his canvas, a comic stripish font for official documents, and a 1960s Saturday Morning […]
The World Cup hasn’t kicked off yet and we’re already reaping the whirlwind that began with FIFA creating a “peace prize” for our president. If Rifai seems to be making a prediction of Trump defacing the World Cup, it’s more on target than FIFA’s awarding him a peace prize two months before he launched the […]
After a night of Bacchanalian revelry day three of The Reuben Weekend gets off to a slow start with nothing scheduled until afternoon giving cartoonists time to recover from the late Reuben Awards presentations. But it is a great afternoon for kids of all ages! Meet Cartoonists! Public Event | Saturday, August 8, 2026 Billy […]
Recently while reading a review of Hal Foster’s Tarzan—The Complete Sunday Comics 1931–1937, I was dismayed to see a young Tarzan’s derrière directed directly in my direction. And it wasn’t just a delineation of a duff, but a full double-wide. With a dimple. If I did a double-take, did readers in the 1930’s? When did […]
I’d have liked to have seen more cartoons about yesterday’s Meet the Press interview, in which Kristin Welker pressed Trump for evidence of his claims and he reacted with the insult captured by Boris, Goris and Rapé, but it having occurred on a Sunday, a lot of cartoonists either decided to wait to make their […]
The San Antonio Spurs are playing The New York Knickerbockers in the National Basketball Association (NBA) finals to claim the 2026 title of the best professional basketball team. The San Antonio Express-News as should be expected is covering the games closely. Unexpectedly (or here): There’s an air of the absurd surrounding the NBA Finals, and […]
Some Stats We’ll start with some encyclopedic entries for comic strips. As The Library sequence (aka The Origin of Ming the Merciless) ends so does Sandy Jarrell‘s stint as guest artist of Flash Gordon. Sandy began this daily run on March 30 and ran through yesterday June 6, 2026. He also drew the April Sunday […]
The knives are out for Graham Platner, the likely Democratic candidate (pending Tuesday’s primaries) challenging Maine Senator Susan Collins in November. Since Platner doesn’t have a legislative record to run on, it’s not surprising that his personal past is taking center stage.Varvel’s cartoon sums up the superficial aspects, with Collins the aging candidate who can’t […]