Jeff Millar, the writing half of the “Tank McNamara” team, died Friday of cancer. I never met Jeff, though his partner on the strip, Bill Hinds, has been an on-line friend for several years. More to the point, Tank McNamara has been on my comics radar since the strip debuted in the mid-Seventies.Cartoons on the […]
Starting today Richard Thompson’s Richards Poor Almanac is available on GoComics. Richard’s Poor Almanac was my first introduction to Richard’s work and quickly won me over. Print copies of the collection, “Richard’s Poor Almanac: 12 Months of Misinformation in Handy Cartoon Form” are becoming more scarce. You can buy one from a reseller over on […]
The Daily, the much publicized first iPad only newspaper created by Ruport Murdock, is going to shut down just shy of two years. All Things D reports that the publication is being shuttered because it “could not find a large enough audience quickly enough” to make the endeavor sustainable long term. Last year it was […]
Jeff Millar, retired Houston Chronicle film critic, humor columnist and co-creator of comic strip Tank McNamara, passed away last Friday after a four year battle with biliary cancer. He was 70 years old. He met up with a local illustrator, Bill Hinds, in 1974 and the two launched Tank McNamara – a satirical comic strip […]
Darren Rovell writing on ESPN.com: The slow demise of old media, and lack of funds by newspapers and magazines, has pushed many cartoonists to the curb. Not Tornoe. “It’s not that cartoons are less relevant than before,” Tornoe said. “They’re actually more popular. You just have to figure out how to distribute your content.” This […]
Dana Summers, editorial cartoonist for the Orlando Sentinel, announced on Facebook he was laid off from the paper due to cutbacks. Jim Romenesko reports that that several Sentinel employees, including Dana, took a buyout. Dana mentions that he’ll continue to syndicate editorial cartoons through his syndicate and focus on his two comic strips Bound and […]
Curtis touches on the current craze of horror stories for young readers.(By the way, I love the disconnect in panels two and three between Curtis’s highly rhetorical question and Barry’s response. He wasn’t looking for an actual answer, little brother.)I don’t know how teachers handle book report after book report based on these dystopic “Hunger […]
An encouraging strip from xkcd.The strip isn’t explicitly autobiographical, but it isn’t not-autobiographical, either, which is a facet of modern cartooning that matters. Some artists are explicitly autobiographical, like Keith Knight, others are implicitly autobiographical, like Adam Huber, and some put the comic on its own footing but are very open about the creative process, […]
I often feel unqualified for this self-appointed gig, being more of a wonk than a geek. I know lots of people online who can go on about ARPANET and I remember people in college with massive printouts that represented a couple of moves in a chess game with somebody in California or wherever, but the […]
Darrin Bell (perhaps) unwittingly hits closer to the mark than he expected in today’s Candorville.I say “perhaps” because I don’t know his intentions. Maybe he wanted a ton of hate mail and thought he saw a path. If so, it was a path well chosen.Except it’s not hummus. It’s falafel.There is very little in the […]
Asia Society interviews The Economist editorial cartoonist Kevin “KAL” Kallaugher. Your 1984 Economist cover of Indira Gandhi led to a nationwide suppression of the magazine. Has anything else you’ve drawn ever met with that kind of censorship – and does an editorial cartoonist feel any kind of pride when his work clearly touches a nerve […]
Monday, Charles Schulz would have turned 90 years old. Yahoo posted 10 Interesting Facts About the Peanuts Creator (but you probably did if you read the Schulz and Peanuts bio. But one of the tidbits they offered that you might not have seen are 42 tribute strips that ran back in 2000 on the day […]
Underground pioneering cartoonist Spain Rodriguez has passed away at the age of 72.From the San Francisco Chronicle: “He was an archetypal character, somewhere between crazy artist crossed with left-wing radical crossed with working-class Latino hood,” Crumb, who lives in France, said in a documentary made this year by Rodriguez’s wife, journalist and filmmaker Susan Stern. […]
Okay, time to examine our priorities as a society:First, courtesy of Nick Anderson, the only Twinkie cartoon you’ll ever need: The “OMG, Twinkies are gonna end!” craze is like the snack cakes themselves: Light, fluffy, insubstantial and fun. And, while it’s probably true that if half the people obsessing over the death of the Twinkie […]
Tom Gammill’s The Doozies will mark it’s fourth year on GoComics.com on December 1. Tom is a TV comedy writer (credits include some of the biggest shows on TV: “Seinfeld”, “The Simpsons”) and the creator of the “Learn to Draw with Tom Gammill” series.Congratulations, Tom.