I’ve never started a blog post with your moment of zen, but, then, I’ve never felt we were so desperately becalmed.And it’s only one minute and 35 seconds of terrifyingly appropriate mood-setting zen, so wotthehell.Joel Pett marks World Press Freedom Day and, discouraging as his take seems, it’s really only a symptom of a much larger issue, […]
Not sure if this is the start of an arc or a one-off, but Pajama Diaries has had an ongoing story that pops up now and then about Ben, who is autistic, and Terri Libenson has been handling it with a nice combination of sympathy, homework and humor.It’s a tough balancing act, because, while you can’t […]
Tom Tomorrow leads off today with a retrospective look at what Trump might have said during the campaign, if he’d been a little more forthcoming.Two takes on this, the first being what is implied in that final panel: Regardless of what Trump actually said, it should have been the job of political analysts to pull aside […]
Much has been made lately of a cartoon that Glenn McCoy drew, which used the Norman Rockwell image of little Ruby Bridges being escorted to a newly-integrated Little Rock school by National Guardsmen in order to comment on protesters who tried to block Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos from visiting a public school. The above mashup […]
Yes, I agree with Soup to Nutz and am continuing my experiment of putting the blog together before I look at Facebook.So far, so good. Though Jeff Stahler got me a little fired up, because the topic of phony “therapy dogs” came up at the park the other day.I’m old enough to remember when people made jokes […]
In the essay that goes with today’s cartoon, Clay Jones concedes that he’s doing more reporting than satirizing, and I have no problem with that. Sometimes that’s all you need to do.At least that’s what we thought before the election, when we were certain that simply exposing the ridiculous contradictions and outright lies would alert […]
I’ll start with Non Sequitur, with which I have no argument except that I wish it were that simple. That’s gonna be today’s theme.There are two sides to this cartoon, starting with the pun and the misheard promise. Well, something’s coming in, anyway, and will be dumped on your doorstep.The other interpretation is that they […]
A peek behind the scenes to explain why I love Between Friends.The above is yesterday’s strip, part of an ongoing arc about Maeve’s crush on the barista in her office building. It’s been kind of silly, but that’s within boundaries, because Maeve’s love-life is always inadvisedly directed, sometimes in silly ways, sometimes in disastrous ones. But it did […]
After yesterday’s rant about cartoonists who don’t leap into action, Clay Bennett nails one that reminds me that some things are worth waiting for. This doesn’t erase my impatience with a system in which the response is “But I don’t do a national cartoon until Wednesday.” I continue to believe that political cartoonists need to be […]
Joe Heller gets top spot today for not over-reaching with his commentary on the Cincinnati gorilla story. Sometimes the simple statement is the best, and there’s no need to go beyond the basic observation that the Internet allows for people to be more openly vicious, judgmental and unfair than they might be in person.A lot […]
First, an announcement: Enough time has now passed that it is no longer a coincidence to depict Donald Trump as a butcher who hacked an elephant into pieces. Stop it.Besides, David Horsey appears here too often for my fair-use comfort level, for which reason I wish someone else had made this excellent historic parallel, because I can hardly […]
You can read this, Watson. No spoilers, except that, as my 14-year-old critic wrote, “Everyone will go see it regardless of whether it’s any good. Happily, it really is good.”In fact, I was struck by the similarities between his review and the one Tom Racine and Lucas Turnbloom did at Tall Tales Radio, both spoiler free. We’ll […]
Rudy Park on the phenomenon of the partisan press.My only quibble is in the last panel: The president’s middle name is only used by his enemies, more or less the same people who were convinced that FDR was Jewish rather than Dutch Reformed, with the difference that Roosevelt didn’t have any Jewish relatives and Obama […]
There are any number of strips and, particularly, political panels today noting the apparent disconnect between surveillance and freedom, but I think Wiley caught it best in Non Sequitur.The big Fourth of July celebration on the National Mall now involves enough scrutiny that it’s ripe for positioning as an ironic symbol of where things stand, […]
The word came across on Twitter yesterday and spread from there: The Chicago Public School system was banning Marjane Satrapi’s graphic memoir, Persepolis, and had ordered all copies hunted down and confiscated.I passed an early link along to my granddaughter, a high school junior whom I have been corrupting with comics for several years now. […]