Madam & Eve is so often based on South African politics that it’s a bit like xkcd in that you chuckle over the ones you get and shrug off the ones you don’t.However, with the World Cup being hosted there a mere month from now, I have a feeling the strip is about to go […]
There weren’t so many “breakfast in bed/chaos in the kitchen” Mother’s Day jokes as usual yesterday, but there weren’t many like this, either.I haven’t looked to see when it will be coming up, but I’ve got a profile of Stone Soup creator Jan Eliot that will be running one of these weekends. It was one […]
I don’t know if Keith Knight is feeling introspective because his strip, “Knight Life,” just turned two years old, or because (as he plugs here) he’s got his first collection out. But here’s an inside look at the work of one of about half a dozen cartoonists who I could put in this spot almost […]
(The first Hagar — courtesy of Chris Browne) (I wrote this profile of Hagar the Horrible’s Chris Browne in 2003 for the Post-Star of Glens Falls, NY)Hagar the Horrible has been the scourge of the northern seas for three decades and shows no signs of changing his ways. Hagar was created by the late Dik […]
Tom Toles sorts out the conservative response to the Times Square Terrorist. (For those who have not followed the details, he’s not projecting any potential views. He’s reporting actual positions.) Toles has a style that is so playful that, even when he’s delivering zingers, it feels pleasant. Or, to riff on an old definition of […]
Seems to be web comic week or something. Sheldon is, as I have come to understand it, a story obstensibly about a young genius billionaire who lives with his grandfather and, early in the strip, accidentally uploaded a dictionary into a duck. Dave Kellett has wisely backed away from the rich genius aspect of the […]
xkcd is that phenomenon we’ve been hearing about: The niche cartoon that can become incredibly popular without having mass appeal because it’s on the web where the true believers can find it. A syndicated cartoon has to be able to get good numbers within each newspaper’s geographic distribution level. A web comic can pick up […]
Rina Piccolo is a particularly good cartoonist who has provided some good laffs in the syndicated world with Tina’s Groove — smooth graphics, good gags and a nice newspaper comic. A good strip and on my daily diet. (Tina is a bit like Betty Boop in that I am embarrassed to be turned on by […]
Jen Sorensen has a decided mean streak, and a willingness to play to a faithful, rather than mass, audience, which makes her weekly strip Slowpoke more incisive than most political/social observation cartoons. What I like about her work is that there are other cartoonists, on both sides of the aisle*, who are capable of becoming […]
I’m a huge fan of Patrick McDonnell’s art but must confess that I’m not blown away by Mutts itself as often as I’d like to be. As he noted in the profile that ran here recently, Mutts is a quiet place in a noisy world and maybe I just like a little more noise in […]
This is a profile I did of Non Sequitur creator Wiley Miller in 2003 for the Post-Star of Glens Falls NY.(Editor’s note: I’ve decided to move the profiles from Sunday to Saturday because I realized that the format issues of Sunday funnies were less daunting than the task of finding a good, compelling Saturday […]
With his twice-a-week multi-panel “Good Reporter,” Don Asmussen performs a difficult task: Three gags on the same current events theme. Considering the number of political cartoonists who have trouble coming up with one belly-buster at a time, going for three is quite a dare, and there are, understandably, a number of times when the third […]
Today’s “In the Bleachers” is probably funnier if you have been following the discussion in sports about the decline in African-American players in Major League Baseball and the increasing dominance of the sport by Latino players.It’s probably even funnier than that if you spent about four hours yesterday on the phone with Comcast and are […]
There are liberals and progressives who hate Prickly City as a right wing strip, just as there are conservatives who hate Doonesbury as a left wing strip.I would argue that both strips, while each having a foot firmly planted in their respective camps, are willing to be critical of those camps. For Scott Stantis, the […]
Keith Knight’s style is deceptively casual. At first glance, it looks like he simply scrawls his artwork, and, for all I know, he may, in fact, draw very quickly. But there’s nothing slapdash about it, and both the action and the facial expressions he captures make even a silly joke like this one twice as […]