James Sturm, graphic novelist and founding member or Center for Cartoon Studies, has created a new book about Santa’s quest to write a book to pull kids away from electronics. Book is entitled, “Adventures in Cartooning: Christmas Special”. The “Offline” project also gave me the idea for my new book, Adventures in Cartooning: Christmas Special!, […]

From the New York Times: Mr. Buffett went on a newspaper spending spree this year by buying more than 60 newspapers from Media General and a small stake in the newspaper company Lee Enterprises, a chain of mostly small dailies based in Iowa. At the time, he stressed that he had great confidence that newspapers […]

Comicsbeat reports that Karl Stevens’s comic page Failure was cancelled because the strip referred to Bud Light as “Diluted Horse Piss.” Anheuser-Busch, which makes Bud Light, is an advertiser in the paper. The strip has been in the alt weekly publication since 2005.As noted in the comments, Tom Spurgeon contacted the editor of the Boston […]

Finally! A chance to comment on a strip just because it’s funny and not have it lead into some endless morass of mind-numbing, partisan political discussion.So here’s Little Dog Lost, and he’s wandered onto a farm where the chickens can’t figure out why their eggs are disappearing, because the only person with access to them […]

The Columbian profiles biographic comic book publisher Darren Davis and his Bluewater Productions and his move to digital. Bluewater titles are typically biographic of celebrities and ripped from the headline stories.From the Columbian: “The biography comics changed the way that we published,” Davis said about adding nonfiction to his company’s catalog in 2008. “If it […]

Adobe announced changes to their upgrade policy stating that only users of the latest version can upgrade to the next release at a discounted price, all other previous versions will need to pay full retail price to get the latest offerings. If you upgrade by the end of this year, you can avoid the full […]

The Vancouver Province sports cartoonist Bob Krieger announced he’s drawn his last cartoon for the paper but will be reassigned to work on the web desk along with editorial cartoonist Dan Murphy. Bob tells me the paper is short staffed so both he and Dan were reassigned as “the best way to manage resources.”This is […]

Interesting read from The New York Times about the push back Amazon is getting from brick and mortar book stores and other retailers: Amazon inspires anxiety just about everywhere, but its publishing arm is getting pushback from all sorts of booksellers, who are scorning the imprint’s most prominent title, Timothy Ferriss’s “The 4-Hour Chef.” That […]

Stan Lynde, creator of Rick O’Shay and Latigo is leaving Montana for Equador. The Montana Standard profiles Stan’s career in comics and his ties to the Big Sky Country. Lynde was turned down by 12 of the big cartoon syndicates, but number 13 was his big break. He met Maurice “Moe” Reilly, vice president of […]

From GoComics: Steve McGarry, creator of Biographic and TrivQuiz on GoComics, now brings us Badlands! About the Strip: Having debuted in 1988 in the short-lived British daily, The Post, Steve McGarry’s western spoof strip “Badlands” was snapped up the following year by The Sun, Britain’s best-selling newspaper. The silly and saucy antics of Marshal Mask […]

Next week’s Barney Google And Snuffy Smith will feature the rarely appearing title namesake character Barney Google. Barney Google was one of the original characters of the strip, but as the Snuffy Smith family gained popularity, Barney Google’s appearances faded. John Rose, current cartoonist for the strip, explained in an interview with King Features: Q: […]

There have been a number of cartoons about the Republicans — or at least some Republicans — repositioning themselves in response to the election debacle, and, in recent days, some specifically about rejecting Grover Norquist and the raise-no-taxes pledge, but they have mostly seemed listless and formulaic. Now comes Rob Rogers with a fairly obvious but […]

Andrews McMeel knows how to print a really nice collection. “BBXX: Baby Blues: Decades 1 & 2” is as the title alludes the first 20 years of the comic strip Baby Blues by Rick Kirkman and Jerry Scott. The book is well bound and designed. But when in comes to books, it’s what is inside […]

Interesting report from TAUW (The Unofficial Apple Weblog) regarding the increase in the number of people shopping this last Black Friday from a mobile device: That usage trend is continuing, based on IBM’s retail analytics report covering Black Friday’s online shopping surge. With online sales on Friday up 20.7% year-over-year, there was a lot of […]

Marketplace reporter Dan Bobkoff looks at a “preemptive strike” by Cleveland Plain Dealer journalists who have organized a petition drive and endorsements to win public support against the paper scaling back to a three days a week print run. “If you have half the reporters, they’re asking half the questions, they’re writing half the stories,” […]