Earlier last year, the Penny Arcade creators Jerry Holkins, Mike Krahulik and Robert Kho, president of operations and business development, launched a Kickstarter campaign to raise enough money to eliminate ads from their website. One of the stretch goals was to create a strip search contest to find a worthy up-and-coming cartoonist. The contest, which […]

Last week, while not mentioning Bill Day or his alleged instance of plagiarism or reuse of his own cartoons, the Association of American Editorial Cartoonists released a statement calling the practice of plagiarism damaging to the profession and the practice of reselling old cartoons with slight modifications is “just plain bad for both the art […]

Soup to Nutz creator Rick Stromoski has launched a Kickstarter campaign to fund the printing of a second printed collection of his strip. The book will be 124 pages of his favorite dailies and Sundays from the fourth through sixth year of the feature’s run. Rick’s project needs $8,500 and just two days into it […]

Terri Libenson certainly isn’t the first cartoonist to riff on how much school curriculum has changed since she was a kid, but today’s Pajama Diaries is different than ninety percent of the “new math” gags of old in that it isn’t just “they always have to change everything” but, rather, “wow, kids are learning some complex […]

NPR’s All Things Considered talks to Matt Wuerker and Scott Stantis on the evolving image presented by cartoonists after the first four years of Obama’s presidency. President Obama would not be the first president to suffer a diminishment of his cartoon image over eight years in office. Jimmy Carter, says Stantis, “was diminished to about […]

I’ve never quite gotten the conventions over naming names in the comics.For instance, in today’s comics, both Baby Blues and Between Friends name “Victoria’s Secret,” which was stranger than usual in that they appear one after another on my (alphabetically arranged) DailyInk page.And they both kind of played on the shocking nature of the store, […]

Edge City, with a phenomenon to which I can attest.When I was in Maine, I covered two school districts, one in town, where, between the university and the hospital, there was an often-depressing abundance of helicopter parents, and the other up in the woods where most of the people were either loggers or farmers, tremendously […]

Lots of people are doing the obvious jokes, but Matt Bors is covering the real issue.For those living under a rock, Notre Dame’s premier player, linebacker Manti T’eo, was the subject this past season of several stories and interviews about a girlfriend who died of leukemia. Then, last week, the sports website Deadspin revealed that […]

(Please, please click on the pic for the larger version)The Gutters is primarily an insider send-up of the comic book industry, with guest artists from within the business, which basically means it has great art but that, being a comic strip person rather than a comic book person, I don’t get the references most days.I got this […]

From the Treetops Tattler’s own Perfesser Cosmo Fishhawk (AKA Michael Cleverly, Chris’s oldest friend):Artist, cartoonist, writer, photographer, Chris Cassatt was sane?.pretty much. He reached the milestone of helming the nationally syndicated comic strip ?SHOE? for one thousand weeks (almost 13 years) in February of 2012, and at that time mental health professionals declared Cassatt to […]

Gary Brookins has worked with Chris Cassatt for 15 years on Jeff MacNelly’s Pluggers panel cartoon and then later on Shoe. I asked him his thoughts on the passing of his friend and colleague.Gary writes:When Jeff turned ?Pluggers? over to me in 1997, he put me in touch with Chris via telephone. Thus began a […]

Chris Cassatt, who became Jeff MacNelly’s assistant in 1993 on the comic strip Shoe has passed away after battling cancer. Chris was introduced to Jeff through Mother Goose and Grimm creator Mike Peters and thus began a collaboration that lasted until Jeff’s passing in 2000. Chris was instrumental in helping Jeff use computers to streamline […]

Dutch cartoonist Arend Van Dam presents the gun controversy with a touch of “O wad some power the giftie gie us.”I realize there is a popular definition of patriotism that involves not caring what anybody thinks of us, but self-confidence and arrogance are really two different things, and, while the former is a very healthy […]

Mother Goose and Grimm creator and editorial cartoonist Mike Peters is heading back home to St. Louis in February to lead the Soulard Mardi Gras parade as their grand marshall.Mike, quoted from the St. Louis Post-Dispatch,” “I’m glad it doesn’t take too much” skill to be marshal, Peters said. “I think all you have to […]

Between Friends bemoans what is, IMHO, not the degradation of our culture so much as the revelation of it.I suspect we’ve always had roughly the same total number of brain cells globally, but simply weren’t hearing from everyone.Think of it as a liquid, once kept in a tall vase with a narrow neck, the exposed […]