Today’s “Buckles” reminds me of a column I wrote back in 1987, based on something I’d seen on, of all places, Kenneth Copeland’s TV ministry.Copeland told the story of taking his little boy to the store and having the kid ask for something, to which Copeland snapped “No, you can’t have that!” And then, he said, […]
Writing about Camp Lord O’ The Flies this past Thursday made me curious enough to go on-line to see if the (real) place is still around. Which it is. And they have some old photos on the site, so I went through those and saw a couple of people I remembered.Oddly enough, my own face […]
Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal puts a fairly common theme in a new package and makes it new. Our perceptions of the world change, and young folks tend to be awfully cock-sure about the nature of reality and how easy it would be to create the perfect society. And then they gain a little more experience. As Twain […]
The Brilliant Mind of Edison Lee on the brilliant marketing of junk food.Saw a thing the other day on Facebook claiming that mayonnaise doesn’t go bad but that onions’ll kill yez. Of course, it turned out to be mostly bogus, but I like the idea of a guy who makes commercial mayonnaise proudly explaining that, […]
Brad Diller, with what would not be my worst nightmare, either. My worst nightmare is coming face to face with incompetent cliche-ridden writing. Yes, I face a lot of nightmares, now more than ever. Some I would be happy to sit down and have a beer with, but not my worst. Only the others.A number of years […]
Pearls Before Swine triggers some PTSD from my years at Camp Lord O’ The Flies.Every year, at the end of the summer camping season, we’d have a big banquet and hand out ribbons and trophies. Not every kid got one, but almost everyone got something. One year, Jose Garcia’s folks flew in from Puerto Rico to […]
The inauguration cartoons are mostly in, and, while it’s hard to pick a winner, it’s not hard to see the trend.While a few highlight national debt as a looming presence or a weight on the president’s back, and some riff on the coincidence of a black man being inaugurated on Martin Luther King Day (which […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
I don’t know too much about Joe Heller personally, but I think he’s got some country in him.When I got to college in the fall of 1967, I found myself in the middle. My college friends were against the war, and I agreed with them that it was a foreign relations disaster. We needed to […]