As it happens, March has been an oddity in this part of the world. We managed to duck the worst of the spring storms with only one day-long power outage, but everyone remains braced for that final blast of branch-busting winter snow, and will likely remain that way until either the storm hits or May, […]
Jan Eliot’s “Stone Soup” is, quietly, one of the smartest strips out there. It’s not exactly based on her life, but she went through some rough spots and, as in the folk tale for which the strip is named, got by with a little of this and a little of that. Jan reports that, to […]
Trust dear Nemi to find the downside of just about anything.
Each year, Terry and Patty Laban’s “Edge City” takes time from its normal round of domestic comedy to do a series of strips about Passover. Like Charlie Brown and the football, it’s an annual event those who follow the strip look forward to, but, again like Charlie Brown, it’s not completely isolated. Just as that […]
Well, wasn’t that an unpleasant process? And there is plenty more inaccurate, unfair commentary still floating around, and there will no doubt be more to come, including a lot of cartoonists who seem to be illustrating other people’s talking points instead of coming up with their own points of view.Which makes Stuart Carlson’s pleased, humorous […]
The best part of “Between Friends” is the sense of “Yeah, exactly” that Sandra Bell-Lundy is so good at capturing. We’re used to the notion that a father who presses his son to excel at sports, or a mother who presses her daughter to be pretty and popular, are viewing their children as reflections of […]
This is the first of 20 profiles I did of cartoonists and their strips for the Post-Star of Glens Falls, NY, beginning in January of 2003, after I had redone their comics page. Jerry Bittle had done “Geech” for years; his newer strip, “Shirley and Son,” was about to debut in the Post-Star.Jerry was easy […]
It’s pretty standard in comedy to have one character make an articulate speech only to have the other character respond with something banal to puncture the whole thing. What cracks me up about this strip is Petey’s complete lack of emotional response in return. He was sent to get his little sister for lunch and […]
One of the things I used to rail about in TV shows decades ago was the random introduction of new characters as someone’s best friend or cousin or college roommate in order to create a crisis that would be solved by the end of the episode with that supposedly important character never to be seen […]
I was in a liquor store once — well, to be honest, I’ve been in a liquor store more than once — But once when I was in a liquor store, I overheard a couple ask the manager which was the best butterscotch schnapps. His professional response was to say, “well, we seem to sell […]
There have been a couple book-burning cartoons about the Texas Board of Education’s dictating changes in history textbooks, a factor that has been known in history circles for decades but got extra emphasis this year, in part because of more changes than usual and probably because editors and reporters are more aware of the conservative […]
Cory Thomas’s “Watch Your Head” is set on a college campus, and since Cory went to Howard, it’s not surprising that WYH is set on the campus of a fictional traditionally black college. And since Cory is black, it’s not surprising that most of the characters in the comic strip are black.But it has kept […]
John Hambrock’s The Brilliant Mind of Edison Lee has not been around terribly long, which makes it remarkable in that it’s one of the few strips to come out in the past 5 years that hasn’t included minimal graphics and a misanthropic animal as its lead character. But there is another thread in emerging strips […]
Don’t Believe In That What the Irish Roman Catholic Children will be told to do next: “Kick it out Peaceably.” (The controversy in 1872 was teaching of Protestant religion in public schools, to which Catholics objected. Nast’s frequent attacks on the Catholic Church in general and his depictions of the Irish as ape-like brutes made […]
There are certain strips I have to be very critical of or they’d be here every day. Cul de Sac is definitely in that class, but I’m living with a couple of little girls not much older than Alice and the question “Where did THAT come from?” is a regular feature of life here. And […]