International political cartoons tend to be highly metaphorical. I don’t know how much the change of language over comparatively smaller geographic areas has to do with this and how much it simply is how political cartoons have evolved overseas, but it remains a fact of cartooning.The net effect for me, as someone raised on the […]
Halloween should be a dream for cartoonists, but, while the graphic potential is high, there are only so many gags: Parents eat the candy, kids try to amass great quantities of candy, kids eat too much candy, etc. And then each year, there is something trendy to work into the strips — bankers and OWS […]
Today’s Pat Oliphant cartoon puts me in mind of a story I’ve probably told here before, but am about to tell again.In the mid-to-late 1970s sometime, my then-wife and I were visiting my grandfather, an archetypal product of the American dream who had worked his way up from the mines to the executive offices. We […]
Pab Sungenis combines cultural literacy with demented foolishness on a level I really appreciate, and today’s “The New Adventures of Queen Victoria” is the conclusion of a short arc shoving a stick into the spokes of that nonsensical movie, “Anonymous,” which probes the theory that William Shakespeare was actually born in Kenya.Or something.I don’t particularly […]
Zach Weiner calls today’s Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal “a bit of an homage (to) the great Quino,” which perhaps means it’s a conceptual rip off, but, since I don’t read a lot of Argentine comics, I don’t know how much it’s based on something specific versus being based on Quino’s general pacing in his silent […]
I’ve said before that Richard Thompson remembers childhood better than anybody else working that beat, and today’s Cul de Sac is both hilarious on the face of it but also a reminder of how thin the barrier between reality and fantasy was in those days.Never mind the Tooth Fairy and other official fantasies. We also […]
One of the books my father gave me in my adult years was his copy of “Best of Yank,” a wartime compilation of that landmark newspaper that I spent more time perusing than he did.In addition to cartoons, the GIs on staff and in the field sent back some good illustrations of their lives at […]
Illustration by Stephane Peray (Stephff) of the Nation, Bangkok.I met a traveller from an antique landWho said: “Two vast and trunkless legs of stoneStand in the desert. Near them on the sand,Half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frownAnd wrinkled lip and sneer of cold commandTell that its sculptor well those passions readWhich yet survive, […]
Here’s a heads up to a potential development over at Baby Blues: The impending arrival of a puppy at the MacPherson household.The strip began when Jerry Scott and Rick Kirkman were attempting to brainstorm some kind of collaboration and Rick, a new father for the second time, became somewhat sidetracked by his other collaboration, as […]
Stuart Carlson does, I think, a particularly fine job with this cartoon in that he does not telegraph whether he feels the politician is sincerely puzzled or purposefully ignoring the messages from the crowd. As the cartoon says, the message — including some very specific concepts — is out there to be heard by those […]
When Matt Bors posted this yesterday, I knew it was going to be the Comic Strip of the Day, a decision that, since I don’t have any sort of early access to strips, doesn’t normally come down until about five in the morning.But who’s going to do better than this? Who’s going to do this […]
You won’t get this Madam & Eve without you have seen this viral video from YouTube of a meeting between a hapless cyclist and a hartebeest:While the M&E gang apply it to South African events — and, hey, it happened down there, so they’re more than entitled to take it local — I don’t think […]
Loose Parts by Dave Blazek. And I can tell him what a couple of those mysterious buttons are for:1. Turn on the cable box but not the television.2. Now turn on the television but turn off the cable box.3. Disable the 1, 3 and 7 buttons on the key pad.
I have met John Hambrock, creator of “The Brilliant Mind of Edison Lee,” and his wife and colorist, Anne, but did not ask them for ID. Still, I suspect neither was born when the Rolling Stones appeared on Ed Sullivan performing “Little Red Rooster.” At least, they don’t look 47.This isn’t that performance, but it will […]
When cartoonists and cartoon fans talk about their early influences or the ones that really got them interested in comics as a medium, the strips you hear about tend to be the groundbreakers, like Barnaby, Pogo, and Peanuts. I liked those strips, though I only saw Barnaby in a collection my parents had and Walt Kelly’s […]