The Piranha Club looks at TV news, with Arnoldine dressed up as a sexy blonde who delivers only the most mundane headlines at the expense of real news, competing against a chimp hired on the basis that people love chimpanzees.Fourth panel says it all.I worked in TV back when the “happy talk” format began, in […]
Timing is everything in comedy.I was notified Friday that a client had direct-deposited a substantial amount of money to my bank account, but apparently it didn’t actually get posted to the account before close of business Friday, and so, what with the MLK holiday today, I won’t see it until tomorrow.Which I understand and which […]
It’s been a week of painful parental flashbacks at Baby Blues, which is part of the strip’s appeal, of course. For those with young kids, the message is “You are not alone.” For those of us whose kids are grown and gone, the message is, “Thanks for reminding me.”As Zoe says, it all comes with […]
“Sherman’s Lagoon” has been riffing on “Dolphin Tale” this week, a feel-good movie about a dolphin who caught her tail in a trap, had it amputated and was fitted with a prosthetic tail. It’s based on a true story, which, since “based on a true story” generally means “We only made up 85 percent of […]
The other day, I gave a quick plug for “Gil,” Norm Feuti’s newly-syndicated strip about a not-very-successful kid with a not-very-perfect life. Here, not quite two weeks into its run, is Gil.I’ve mentioned this before, but Norm’s other strip, “Retail,” came out when I was working at a newspaper and the samples in the sales […]
Today’s Rhymes With Orange raises a frightening question: I wonder if all those years of listening to Tony the Tiger and the Cheerios Kid were simply programming us to accept empty promises from friendly, two-dimensional characters?And I wonder if getting a few more days between myself and the New Hampshire Primary would ease that feeling […]
Herblock had little patience for Barry Goldwater’s pull-yourselves-up-by-your-bootstraps attitude towards the poor, and expresses it in straightforward fashion with this 1961 broadside.God knows what he’d make of Mitt Romney. Of course, Mitt didn’t inherit a department store. He didn’t even inherit a car company. We don’t pass on actual businesses to our children anymore. When […]
The Knight Life with a double-swipe — one at the economy and one at the ironic hipsters who made PBR a well-known acronym.There is no such thing as ironic beer. Beer comes in two basic forms: Good beer and Bad beer. It is a continuum and there are plenty of beers that are “okay,” and […]
Pearls Before Swine and I are running a terrible risk today.It’s a funny gag, but if you mention any computer problem on line, you get comments about how you are using the wrong computer and the wrong operating system and how, if you simply yank out the virtual guts and replace them with brilliant things […]
Kirk Walters with a spot-on metaphor for what happened in Iowa Tuesday and what it means for Rick Santorum and the next few weeks of the GOP Death March.What I particularly like about it is the innocence mixed with cruelty. Little kids do this to ants, and it isn’t nice but it doesn’t arise to […]
One of the things Jerry Scott and Jim Borgman always hear is that Zits opens conversations between parents and adolescents, whether that day’s strip features Jeremy or his folks as the butt of the joke. That’s probably why Zits is one of the top strips in terms of the number of papers that feature it, […]
Matt Wuerker brings up an interesting — which is to say, potentially troublesome — issue in editorial cartooning.When you are a witness at a trial, it’s important that you only answer the question that was asked, lest you inadvertantly raise another question you didn’t want to be asked.Same rule applies in cartooning: Tread carefully.I’m in […]
Tom Spurgeon points readers to this collection of Winsor McCay editorial cartoons. They are presented without context and appear to be illustrations for editorials rather than freestanding cartoons, but they do have their years attached to their file names, and this one is from 1914.It immediately put me in mind of this passage from Jacob […]
Actually, just about any caption would have worked with this Non Sequitur headstone gag. After an hour or so of reading strips in which the characters fall asleep before midnight on New Year’s Eve, I was beginning to chuckle over the “This feature did not update” messages.But I’d have liked this one anyway. Headstone gags […]
I had a brief struggle this morning, because I felt like doing something kind of light and breezy and there were a couple of pretty funny strips to consider. But I got to Cartoon Movement and there was Sarah Glidden with this engrossing look at the Iraqi refugee community in Syria.Not what you’d call “light […]