Tax time is one of those Annual Mandatory Cartooning Occasions, but, while a lot of cartoonists simply turn in a “shirt off my back” strip and take the day off, others get some funny stuff out of it.Frazz manages to turn the vagaries of this year’s calendar into a gag that combines a general joke […]
One of the fundamental philosophies here (obviously) is that a good cartoon makes you think beyond the few seconds it takes to read it. Whether or not you actually “laugh out loud,” there’s some element of the piece that you identify with or it doesn’t work at all.Between Friends, for instance: I sometimes envy people […]
My trip back a half century the other day sparked some curiosity, and when I did a little poking around this morning, it turns out that a quarter century ago today, papers were covering the news that Saddam Hussein had announced his withdrawal from Kuwait. So here are some cartoons from that date, and let me […]
While I’m adjusting to apolitical weekdays, here are a pair of worthy publications I’ve been meaning to review.Ed Stein’s Sleeper Avenue is a sometimes sweet, sometimes slightly biting, memoir of growing up a half century ago, and he’s gathered his stories into a book format.I was looking back in my archives for a sample from a […]
Judging from the flood of cartoons about the GOP’s whining, it’s just me and Matt Wuerker who recognize that the media hasn’t exactly been faultless in this.As I noted in the immediate aftermath of the CNBC-hosted debate, the rude incompetence of the moderators handed the candidates a weapon. I’ve got little to add to what I […]
(Freshly Squeezed)There was a joke going around the Soviet Union, back when such a place existed, about an attempt by the leader to burnish the image of the central government.I’m sure the role of leader in the joke was as quickly re-cast to remain current as the role itself was recast in reality, as that […]
For a season, and a day, dedicated to rebirth, there sure were plenty of “boy am I old” cartoons today.We’ll ease into this with Between Friends, which is a fairly gentle parent-child-tech gag.(It also, I think, fits today’s topic as a subtle shift in age for Emma. Sandra Bell Lundy periodically nudges her characters forward […]
This cartoon by Raul Fernando Zuleta pleases me for a variety of reasons beyond its overall sardonic brilliance.The first is the simple one, which is tying it into the idiotic notion by Facebook people that if a particular sick/crippled/disabled/dying child gets a number of “likes,” some cosmic event will occur. But that’s just foolishness in […]
I am not particularly obsessed with age at the moment, despite having just hit the magical Sgt. Pepper milestone, which I noted the other day with some links to prufrockian thoughts of the past.Still, the issue of coming into the home stretch is there, and, while today’s Beetle Bailey made me laugh in a “there […]
“Freshly Squeezed” brings back a memory of the kickoff to my second bachelorhood. Not a good memory or a bad memory but a “scratch your head” memory. Entering second bachelorhood is a moment of re-orientation, so I suppose it varies considerably, depending on your first bachelorhood and what you learned in the interim, as well […]
Ed Stein created the strip “Freshly Squeezed” in 2010 as a response to the economic collapse, which he got to see close up in 2009, when, after he had served about 30 years as its editorial cartoonist, the Rocky Mountain News shut down its presses.The strength of Freshly Squeezed is that he centers it on the […]
I’m currently working on a series for kids about Theodore Roosevelt and conservation, and, as part of that, was going through political cartoons of the era.This two page spread by Puck cartoonist L.M. Glackens ran in that publication in 1906, when William Randolph Hearst was a candidate for governor of New York (click on it […]
What, twice in four days? Well, yes, but this Ed Stein comic is his syndicated strip, “Freshly Squeezed,” about a family dealing with the new economy. Friday’s praise was for Ed Stein’s editorial cartoon about Europe dealing with the new economy.What can I say? The dude’s on a roll.Ed is one of the talented journalists […]
One of the old, hoary standbys of learning about political cartoons in high school is the list of symbols to be memorized: The bear is Russia, the bulldog is Great Britain, Uncle Sam is America, plus the list of landmarks like Big Ben, the Statue of Liberty, the Taj Mahal.We teach political cartoons the way […]
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 […]