Frew’s The Phantom reaches #2000, Walt Handelsman The Saints Caption Contest sets a record, a new Bob Staake book coming, news deserts and digitals – a report, Jason Chatfield on Substack as an alternative revenue stream, and The Kinks get a comic strip mention. The Phantom #2000 Missed it. Frew Publications in Australia earlier this […]
Blondie and Dagwood and … Blame Blondie by Dean Young and John Marshall (actually Elmo) for this post’s title. So is John Zakour and Scott Roberts’ Working Daze situated in the city where Dagwood works? Lou from Dagwood’s favorite diner showed up in the Working Daze panel today. One more Blondie as part of today’s […]
We’ll start with an editorial cartoon that uses a comic strip character of a Pulitzer Prize-wining cartoonist. Dave Whamond does a very good Opus, created by Berkeley Breathed whose Bloom County won a Pulitzer. Dave has also used Charlie Brown and a psuedo-Dennis the Menace lately. The Spokesman-Review of Spokane, Washington, has joined a small […]
The Free Lance–Star’s iconic newsboy statue, Lance, has returned to its longtime home in downtown Fredericksburg. For two decades, the bronze statue stood watch in front of the newspaper’s front entrance off Amelia Street, between Douglas Street and Washington Avenue. When the newspaper moved out of downtown in 2016, Lance came along and was installed […]
An existential threat to Kentucky’s community newspapers Yeah, big newspapers that are part of big groups are turning their potential readers off by moving the news editors to out of town newsrooms that don’t care about local news. But Linda Boileau‘s cartoon above for The State Journal brings our attention to the smaller locally owned […]
Charles Schulz was probably the most adored cartoonist ever and his Peanuts comic strip more loved than any other. Twenty-five years ago we lost both of them. Peanuts ending was front page news above the fold. Of newspapers not carrying the story on page one most that carried the strip at least had a notice […]
Andertoons (AMS) takes a daring step, making a joke based on the reader having a good vocabulary, but which is funnier if the reader has just enough of a good vocabulary to know what the word means and to feel somewhat proud of that. That is, if ubiquitous/ubiquity were more common words, there’d be nothing […]
Jack Ohman (Tribune) had this cartoon up before Jeff Bezos broke a pair of rules: Bezos has written a too-long piece for his newspaper explaining why he decided not to publish a presidential endorsement but not explaining why they earlier published congressional endorsements or why he waited until eleven days before the election to make […]
This Bob Eckstein cartoon came along at a propitious time, because I opened a Threads account and soon thereafter showed an interest in writers. Ever since, my feed has been filled with postings by people who ought to get off line and write something instead of talking about it. I took writing courses in college […]
Remember that graffito that read “We are the people our parents warned us about?” Well, as Non Sequitur (AMS) points out, we are now the people we warned ourselves about. I miss the old days, but when I really think back, I realize that most of the fun things I did then fall under the […]
At the risk of sounding like an incompetent, unpatriotic university president, I think context matters, and Jefferson’s oft-quoted remark about government without newspapers versus newspapers without government deserves some. He was writing specifically about Shay’s Rebellion, but he might have been writing about January 6, except that, while Washington had political opponents, most hard-core Tories […]
In case you missed it, Paul Fell summarizes the growing, and increasingly official, war on the free press. On one hand, we have a Civil War festering within the nation, by which I mean without the benefit of one set of states going off in one direction and another set staying put. Instead, the rebels […]
(Jack Ohman — Pulitzer Prize, 2016) (Joel Pett — Pulitzer Prize, 2000) (Kevin Siers — Pulitzer Prize, 2014) This is, alas, a Juxtaposition of the Fired. The McClatchy chain of newspapers, which has been struggling in bankruptcy for more than three years, has decided to cut costs by eliminating three of the nation’s leading editorial […]
David Fitzsimmons drew this cartoon in 2008, but now he’s “writing about us” himself, or, at least, “us” in a modified sense, since he took a buyout in January and became a freelancer. (h/t to Michael Rhode) Temporarily, he predicts: Readers familiar with the industry will reel in horror to learn that the Arizona Daily […]
The current question for political commentators seems to be “Can you walk and chew gum at the same time?” Adam Zyglis drew this cartoon before SCOTUS handed down their abortion decision last week, but it’s a good marker of where we’re at, because, amid all the uproar over that story, there has been a […]