Ink Blotters Calendars are being offered for 2026, but we’re going back to 1946/47 with the Internet Archive and some Bull of the Woods ink blotters by J. R. Williams of Out Our Way fame courtesy of Mike Rhode. Those would have been perfect for your workshop. Also Mike presents a set of undated cartoon […]
Douglas Rodger saluted American workers with this Labor Day cartoon in the San Francisco News a century ago, but, in Chicago, my grandmother was involved in a different sort of labor, and I am rising to a point of personal privilege today. In those days, fathers were banished to the waiting room, and so in […]
(Banner by Johnny Walbridge, who, as noted yesterday, went on to be a Disney writer and animator.) We’ll start our look back at 1924 with a strip I didn’t know existed, possibly because it was only around for about three years. Ring Lardner was a popular writer and this was something of an extension of […]
As you are reading this, I am en route to the AAEC Convention in San Francisco, which I will report on in the coming days. While you wait, and while I fly, here is what you’d have read in a California paper had you picked one up a century ago today. 1923 was a pretty […]
Clay Jones takes a poke at cartoonists who have drawn Joe Manchin as the Grinch, and I’m happy to pass it on because I didn’t really want to do an entire posting of Grinch/Manchin cartoons. Several Grinch cartoons had appeared before the current flood of Manchin cartoons, and it’s not surprising, given how the Grinch […]
Today’s Barney and Clyde (WPWG) does a nice job of encapsulating the gap between what we say and what we are actually willing to do. I’ve got to admire Barney for sticking to his guns in the face of a non-binding opportunity to appear decent, but I suppose he wouldn’t have amassed his fortune and […]
It used to be a tradition this time of year to break the fourth wall and wish readers a Merry Christmas, these being some examples by classic strips back in 1925. I didn’t see many examples today, though it may be that, come next Friday, more cartoonists will do that. It’s a clumsy situation […]
One of these women is turning 94 today and the other is my great-granddaughter and thus her great-great-grandaughter. So, in honor of the occasion, here are some cartoons my grandfather might have read in the newspaper when he wasn’t pacing the floor on September 1, 1924, which is what expectant fathers did in those days. […]