I suppose we should have seen it coming a half century ago, when people started buying “Archie Bunker for President” merchandise. As I’ve said here often, I watched “All in the Family” for several weeks before deciding that sitting through 20 minutes of racist, sexist jokes wasn’t worth the three-minute “Aw, Archie! You’re so wrong!” […]
Neither, thanks. Given the semi-news out of Minneapolis and Washington, this seems like a good day to avoid political pontificating until we see what’s going on. It’s not time to celebrate and it’s certainly not time to relax. In the words of the master, Yogi Berra, it’s not over ’til it’s over. And it ain’t, […]
Creating a multi-panel, multi-gag comic poses an obvious problem: You have to be insightful with each panel, and most cartoonists do well to produce five in a row when they’re producing a single comic each day without trying to tie them all into a specific theme.McFadden is lucky while the rest of us are not, […]
As Christmas season fades, Ramirez asks if there are no prisons, and if the workhouses are still in operation. Scrooge at least conceded that his taxes — however reluctantly — supported those institutions. Ramirez, by contrast, insists that any but minimal support is a form of theft.As noted yesterday, I’ve been reading Barbara Tuchman’s history […]
The Constitution turned 238 yesterday, including the first 10 amendments, aka “The Bill of Rights.”In case you’ve forgotten, or went to a school that didn’t teach history, it was a struggle to come up with a governing document that everyone could agree with. There was a substantial debate in the newspapers between Founders who believed […]
Joe Wos and Alice in Wonderland; Dan O’Neill and The Air Pirates; Krazy Kat and Comics Kingdom; The Washington Post, The Los Angeles Times, and vertical comics; Garry Trudeau, Doonesbury, and Trump; Spongebob Squarepants and the United States Postal Service.Let’s kick this off with a couple Kickstarters. Chère Noble and Joe Wos are teaming up […]
Jason Chatfield, cartoon editor; Tom Toro, exclusive cartoonist; cartooning for School Administrator; cartooning opportunities from The New Gag Recap; The American Bystander and The New Yorker kinship.Reports of the demise of magazine cartooning, other than The New Yorker, are exaggerated. Cartoonist Jason Chatfield also Jason Chatfield Cartoon Editor Cartoonist Jason Chatfield brings news that he […]
How on earth did we get here? Robert Ariail notes the positive messages of past presidents, contrasting them with Trump’s declaration that we’ve become a “garbage can.”But how many times can you marvel over how, in the past, such-and-such an action would have ended a political career but those rules don’t apply to Donald Trump? […]
The answer is a lot easier than Walt Handelsman expected it to be.As noted here yesterday, the stock market is largely driven by a combination of rumors and panic, as Kal Kallaugher noted in the wake of the October 1987 crash:The good news is that Wall Street followed its worst day in two years with […]
One bit of political commentary before we switch to humor: Wilbur Dawbarn’s piece reminds me of a conversation I had with my father as he pondered his future in the steel industry. He accused his contemporaries — the WWII generation — of failing to bring younger people into leadership positions, with the result that there […]
Barbara Smaller’s cartoon is hardly breakthrough humor, subconsciously echoing as it does a Tom Toro piece that has become a classic:It is odd that they both ran in the New Yorker. As an editor, I certainly would have recognized the repetitive nature and declined to run the second iteration.OTOH, if I were editing somewhere else, […]
Ivan Ehlers captures my mood as I watch the nation’s dialogue degenerate into what seems like a contest to see who can screw things up more: Protesters who increasingly seem like rebels without a plan or politicians determined to turn molehills into active volcanos.I feel like a spectator, unable to either reason with the players […]
Kevin Necessary’s cartoon must surely seem an exaggeration to anyone who hasn’t been following the real-world case, but this argument is not simply being advanced in earnest but appears to have some traction with a substantial portion of the Supreme Court.And about that court: As Ann Telnaes points out, even having his wife active in […]
The whole world is watching, and Peter Schrank indicates what the whole world is thinking, or at least the whole world aside from Russia, Hungary and North Korea, and the world who thought he was going away.That narrows it down considerably, mostly leaving us to wonder if Shrank means “madder” in the American “angry” sense […]
Ivan Ehlers reminds me of how lucky I am to have been getting my Internet from a 4G connection rather than cable for the past two years. Apparently, since I get my signal from towers rather than a cable head end, Internet advertisers have no idea where I live, and the preponderance of ads I […]