There’s a thing going around — oh, sorry — got to start over …There’s a meme – which is much more important than “a thing going around” — that exists under a few different names, but which can be tracked down by Googling “Superman is kind of a dick.” It consists of covers of old DC […]
Sid Couchey, best known around the comics industry for his work with Harvey comics, particularly on Richie Rich, Little Lotta and Little Dot, died this past Sunday. Tom Spurgeon has a fine piece on Sid over at Comics Reporter, with links you should check out.Sid was also a large presence in the northeastern tip of […]
Pros & Cons is always worthwhile and often laugh-out-loud funny, either because Kieran Meehan has found a new spot to tickle or because he’s gone back to one of his best and hit it yet again, sharply. (I’ve mentioned both Jack Benny and the old, classic Bob Newhart Show enough that readers should recognize by […]
I’m tied up for the next few days with some workshops for middle-school journalists, so will be posting some of the classic cartoons I used to show high school students in a presentation on the topic. The presentation began with the Nast cartoon of the Tweed Ring that I posted here a few days ago. […]
A major advantage of webcomics is short deadlines, and so The New Adventures of Queen Victoria is able to jump on this week’s announcement by DC Comics that they are rebooting their line of comics and starting over, including numbering their next issues as “#1.”Apparently, she are not amused, or impressed.If you pursue that link […]
Among the things we might consider to save tax money, how about cutting off these bloodsuckers? Tom the Dancing Bug on the scam artists and thieves who recruit the underemployed to apply for Pell Grants and student loans, and to use up their GI Bill funding on their behalf, pressuring people to sign up who […]
Ed Stein may be waxing nostalgic this week, as his new strip, “Freshly Squeezed,” shifts focus from the home to the office, where everyone except ownership is preparing to do more with less.”Freshly Squeezed” is a spinoff from “Denver Square,” a strip Ed did for The Rocky Mountain News for about a decade. Launched September […]
There is a large raft of Egypt cartoons floating around right now, some of them totally cloth-eared, others obvious and some, the ones from a little closer to the scene, more focused on what it means to the rest of the region than what is actually happening there.Well, what is actually happening there? South African […]
Doonesbury uses this narrative technique better than anybody in the business — ramp it up just enough to show how silly it is, but not to the point where it no longer reflects the original thought.By using Mike-watching-television rather than Roland-interviewing-speaker, Trudeau avoids having to depict Congressman Shuler, who has indeed said he plans to […]
Big Nate offers a reminder of what middle school was really like, for those of us who didn’t actually go to middle school but remember junior high. Or, in my case, college, where there was a 7-to-1 ratio of men to women and freshman year was essentially futile. And very much like middle school.But I […]
The recent summit to save tigers, held in St. Petersburg, Russia, got scant attention in the US press but was reported elsewhere, apparently including Holland, where it elicited this cartoon from Arend Van Dam.Van Dam’s work is simple but contains some bite and a little more implied narrative than the average international cartoon, which tends, […]
Garry Trudeau’s work in Doonesbury with veterans and with active-duty GIs has been exemplary and I think marks a new point in war coverage and media. Today’s humorous depiction of the modern, plugged-in GI is a pretty good example.Let me try to get this right without cranking out a six-volume explanation.The Crimean War (1853-56) was […]
You’d think that Jef Mallett, noted endurance athlete, overall health freak and occasional wearer of Spandex, would join in the cartoonists’ chorus of routinely decrying hunting.But he’s a native Michigander and a bluecollar guy at heart and I suspect he grew up with an understanding of where it all fits into local lifestyles and economics, […]
Wednesday is usually a day for one-off gag strips, because all the story arcs are pretty well in motion and it’s hard to bring readers who haven’t been following them up to date, and they’re not delivering punchlines yet anyway, so there’s really no point in trying.However, Cul de Sac tends to operate on a […]
The New Adventures of Queen Victoria has a minimalist style, to say the least, and, as a webcomic, a rapid-response capability that print comics should envy.I really like today’s strip, but I suspect that there is a link between the progressives’ penchant for self-criticism and their inability to hold power. Conservative cartoonists never eat their […]