Sandra Bell Lundy breaks through the moldy Mother’s Day cartoons with this Between Friends salute to non-average moms.Obviously, it helps that she had already created a non-average parental situation which had previously addressed a real-life issue, rather than simply settling into the Mom-Dad-Bud-and-Sis pre-fab cartoon model.My feed is full of strips that offer up gags […]
Several cartoonists took up the topic of this being February 29, with Retail taking the prize for pointing out how utterly insignificant the phenomenon is in the long run. Or even the short.It would be great if Leap Year Day were an actual universal holiday, if we really said “This day doesn’t count!” and everything […]
As this Lenten avoiding-political-cartoons things progresses, I’m finding how hard it is to draw the line, not simply because so many strips specifically include politics, but because even the ones that don’t — like today’s Daddy’s Home — take on a political spin when your feed is suddenly full of conspiracy theories based on Scalia’s […]
Let’s get this out of the way, first: There aren’t any new Groundhog Day jokes.None.Jimmy Johnson will admit it, other cartoonists won’t.Some cartoonists simply ignored the day and went about their business, but there were plenty of “six more weeks of whatever” gags.And here’s the funny part (’cause the gags aren’t): Jimmy nails it. It’s […]
(Arlo & Janis) (Anne and God)Let’s start the day with this Juxtaposition.Janis is right: Market forces determine what’s available. If nobody watched the violent, fear-inducing, division-creating, hateful crap on TV and in the movies, they’d stop making it.Arlo is right: Knowing that enough of our fellow-citizens enjoy this toxic garbage to keep it around is […]
Sheldon muses on the dissimilarites between Greek and Roman culture and there certainly are such. Maybe the Etruscans did more to westernize the refugees from Troy who landed on their shores than we generally think.My first conflict with this topic came when Eldest Son was in third grade and remarked upon how strange it was […]
Let’s start today’s roundup with Jimmy Margulies on the new, revised, please-keep-requiring-them SATs, the makers of which have now decided to drop the college-bound-level vocabulary portion and reset the top score back to 1600, having previously stopped asking kids to show their reasoning powers through analogies.You remember the analogies, right? SATS:high score::Youth Soccer:A. professional careerB. World […]
Dave Kellett on what may be the most annoying feature of an increasingly annoying Internet. As it happens, I ranted about LinkedIn almost exactly a year ago. I signed up because everyone said you had to sign up, then realized there was no real point in it and tried to escape, but, like Sheldon’s grandfather, I […]
In his nearly-eponymous strip, Harry Bliss raises an issue that has been on my mind for a very long time but happened to surface recently.There are all kinds of issues to sort out within the context of having children later in life.The financial ones are kind of weird to me, because I’ve never much felt […]
Hats off to Terri Libenson for a fresh take on what is generally one of the lamest days of the year on the comics page.Granted, she’s riffing on the now-iconic movie rather than the over-promoted tradition itself, but I’m also giving her credit for an overall breakthrough: The new wrinkle for the “over-worked mom” theme […]
Let’s start with stupid today and work our way up.Gags about saggy blue jeans and other teen fashions are the stuff of lame, burned-out old hacks, but today’s Bizarro is more incisive, probing beyond Andy Rooney and getting into more dangerous Bill Cosby territory.I was a huge Bill Cosby fan in my early teen years. But […]
No heavy lifting today. Tank McNamara on the topic of college sports and amateurism. I’m not sure where Bill Hinds is taking this, but it’s a worthwhile issue, particularly as we prepare for a round of (yawn) Winter Olympics.The Olympics once had an elitist, often racist, amateurism requirement that needed to go. But the combination […]
I’ve mentioned this before, but GoComics is now featuring “Origins of the Sunday Comics,” selections from a history of the same being compiled by Peter Maresca and, as GoComics says, available in “all of their full, broadsheet-sized glory in the new book from Sunday Press: Society is Nix, Gleeful Anarchy at the Dawn of the […]
Brian Basset’s Red and Rover is rarely a fall-on-the-floor laugh fest, but its nostalgic portrayal of a boy and his dog in a recent but unspecified past is always a nice stop on the comic highway.Today, he outdoes himself with a back-to-school strip that rises far above the glut of predictable back-to-school strips.I wrote the […]
Reruns (even ones featuring Rerun) shouldn’t take up valuable real estate on the print comics page, but they’re a lot of fun on the seemingly infinite Web. Especially when they are reruns of things you didn’t see the first time, like this Richard’s Poor Almanac entry, kindly presented a few days early so we can […]