A pair of “Prickly City” strips — yesterday’s and today’s — with an interestingly timed comment on role models and heroes.The issue of athletes as role models has been around for a very long time, and longer than that if you include people like Perseus, who unintentionally fulfilled a prophecy when, at a competition on […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
Amidst the predictable jokes about leftovers, and the equally predictable tee-hee-hee’s over Black Friday shopping (Anyone going for the Trudy Trifecta? “Out at midnight, overdrew the checking account, crumpled the fender pulling into the garage afterwards”? Nobody? Maybe next year!) , some cartoonists have serious comments to make. Like a lot of newspaper-based editorial cartoonists, Derf […]
Burkina Faso’s Damien Glez salutes a satiric take on “poverty porn” that has gone viral among those who care about Africa or about assistance to the Third World in general. Poverty Porn is the use of heart-tugging images to excite (and that’s the right word) compassion in potential donors. The origin of the phrase itself is a […]
Today’s Zits scores in large part for its delightful synchronicity with yesterday’s “Leave it to Beaver” spoof. It so happens that my rant on the misappropriation of the show to symbolize a brain-dead era is not my only oh-god-here-he-goes-again Andy-Rooney-style use of “The Cleaver Family As Society Bellwether.”I have an entirely other rant about clothing and […]
Tom the Dancing Bug does a nice takedown on Bill O’Reilly’s transparent outing of the real objections to Obama’s re-election: That it signifies the end of the “white establishment” (his words) as the guardians of “traditional America.”And Bolling only had to use the tool that O’Reilly had handed him, which was an allusion to the […]
A few days ago, I blogged about conservative cartoonists who were taking a pragmatic and sensible approach to the “secession” movement.Here’s an even more fundamentally sound look at current politics, from Bob Gorrell, who is usually something of a bomb-thrower.I think it’s a terrific adaptation, and that’s aside from whatever his actual recommendation may be […]
In today’s Non Sequitur, Wiley Miller manages to combine a nagging annoyance with a serious problem. One of the basic tools in the cartoonist’s bag of tricks, well-applied.I cannot begin to express how sick I am of hearing about chocolate.And bacon.And zombies.But at least nobody claims to have found health benefits in bacon or zombies.Now, […]