If you missed the announcement the other day, Edge City is shutting down at the end of the year, and part of the wrap is that the guys were approached by a rival who made them a generous offer. The truly fictional part is that the new company agreed not to lay anyone off. If the strip […]
The Knight Life ponders the weird gap between the role models we offer our kids and the roles we expect them to model.Thus was it ever, Keefe, though you do have to differentiate between the characters parents provide to their children versus the characters kids find on their own.When I was researching a story about […]
Kudos to Mark Tatulli for the timing of today’s Lio, which reminded me to go ahead and post my 12-year-old reporter’s review of “In the Heart of the Sea,” which opens today. This is her raw copy, but I’m not making a lot of edits for the weekly publication and I hope Lio can smuggle […]
(Rudy Park) (Phil Hands)In 1979, our seven-year-old’s best friend’s parents were going through a divorce, and we worried about how it would effect him. He knew kids of single parents, but this was the first time he’d seen a marriage break up. So when “Kramer vs Kramer” came out that year, we took him to […]
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 […]
Okay, granted, “high” would be a bad idea. We all know “high” would be a bad idea.But maybe if you set it on “low.”Baby Blues plays on a spectrum of issues with this simple gag, because there’s substantial scholarship to indicate that kids benefit from their father’s horseplay. Not sure suspending the baby from a ceiling […]
Mike Thompson takes a poke at the chickenhawks who would like to see us take on a major nuclear power because, y’know, it would make us more macho and stuff.I’ve recently-and-often said that I don’t much like chickenhawks, and I like them even less since the draft ended, since now they aren’t even required to […]
One of the founding principles of this blog is that a good cartoon spurs not just laughter, but thought. Today’s lesson is on how little the intent of the cartoon directs the tone of those thoughts.If you read the comments (and this is one of the few web sites where they won’t send you into […]
First, the weather:I would note that neither Rick Kirkman nor Jerry Scott live in a part of the country that actually sees much of what I would call “cold weather.” We’ve been grazing 20 below (Note to overseas readers: that’s F) this past week, so today’s Baby Blues is a nice bit of timing.On one […]
I’ve seen a couple of cartoons that riffed on the wall dividing Bethlehem, and then saw a report on Al Jazeera America about the stress the town is under. It reminded me of when I used to do a weekly educational feature on political cartoons, and, specifically, of this piece from December 28, 2005.Normally, I’d […]
I said before that the Danny-Goes-To-University theme at Between Friends was going to be a rich vein for Sandra Bell Lundy, and it is proving to be just that.I also said then that she had set Kim up well, since Kim is not overly neurotic as a parent and so the issue can unfold on […]
It’s fashionable to hate Garfield, with his repetitive dread of Mondays and abuse of Odie and embrace of lasagna and so forth and so on. Or, at least, that’s what I assume still goes on there. To tell the truth, for all the strips I read every day, Garfield isn’t one of them.However, that said […]
Gocomics has just launched “Origins of the Sunday Comics,” and I guess the best way to explain it is to reprint their explanation:This series will present the earliest offerings—from 1895 to 1915—of the famous and lesser-known cartoonists who where there when comics were born—over 150 creations from more then 50 superb artists, most reproduced here […]
Okay, this is beyond my experience. Heart of the City is in an arc in which Heart’s mom is taking her and her buddy Kat to a One Direction concert, One Direction being, as that link will show you, a for-real androgynous pre-teen pre-fab group.(And let me pause here to give Mark Tatulli props for referencing […]
Keith Knight on young people and the prison industry.I’ll leave the racial aspects of things in his hands, except to remember that it was Richard Pryor who said of the legal system: “You go down there looking for justice; that’s what you find: Just us.”I certainly agree that we bust kids for stuff we used to […]