Among its attractions and achievements Liverpool England is, according to Wikipedia, “an important cultural centre within the United Kingdom, incorporating music, performing arts, museums and art galleries, literature and nightlife amongst others.” Most notably it is where they first appeared. “They” being Curly Wee and Gussie Goose. above: the first and second installments of Curly […]
Spy vs. Spy, Brother Jonathan, and 20 Trailblazing Comic Strips That Changed the GameSpy vs. Spy and Antonio Prohías The seventy-first issue of MAD Magazine, cover dated June 1962, contains a noteworthy entry in Antonio Prohías’ Spy vs. Spy, a comic strip depicting Looney Tunes-style espionage between two pointy-headed, monochromatic secret agents. This particular installment […]
Matt Groening and Life in Hell, Bruce Petty and the Vietnam War, Etta Hulme and Comic Books, Art Evans and College Mascots, Carl Jones and The Boondocks, Tom Batiuk and Chuck Ayers and Roses in December.Before there was Homer, there was Binky Everyone knows that The Simpsons is what made Matt Groening one of the […]
The Phantom and The Muppets from the 1980s; Paul Bunyan from the early 20th Century, comic strip lettering from later in the 1900s; and the first Peanuts TV animation.Hermes Press, the publisher of The Complete Phantom Dailies, missed an episode between Volume 29 and Volume 30. For those who didn’t keep track of our first […]
Scott Brown & Over 65; The Phantom 1980 & 2023; Asterix & Obelix and Goscinny & Uderzo and Fabcaro & Conrad; G. B. Trudeau and Maggie & Jiggs & Blondie & Dagwood & Lucy & CharlieThe Billy Ireland Biographical Note on Scott Brown: Scott Brown was a cartoon artist and snowfall forecaster from Mansfield, Ohio. […]
Wednesday came and went without a Wayback installment because I am easily distrac… Anyway, to paraphrase Churchy LaFemme: Wayback Whensday come on a Saturday this week. The Lost Phantom Longtime Phantom penciler George Olesen spent his summer seasons in Denmark. As a result, the Phantom strips make quite a trek, beginning as a script from […]
Unlike the 2020s The Pulitzers had an Editorial Cartooning category in the 1920s. Rollin Kirby took three of the first seven Pulitzers awarded in that journalism division. The inaugural honor went to Rollin Kirby, who worked for an array of New York newspapers and magazines. He won the award for his depiction of the victims […]
In McCay, it was a combination of expansive imagination, multi-disciplinary eccentricity, and restless work ethic that set him apart. In 1905, after working on a handful of comic properties, he debuted what would become his signature strip, a sprawling full-page color adventure called “Little Nemo in Slumberland.” The series was an elegant fantasy in which […]
In places like New York City, papers were sold to the masses at a penny a copy. Thus this era is called the Penny Press. It’s also the era of what was called Yellow Journalism. The term arose out of a battle between newspaper barons Joseph Pulitzer and William Randolph Hearst about a comic strip […]
Scott Adams, Mario DeMarco, Jack Lindstrom, Jim Keefe, George Herriman, and the Warner Bros. cartoon studio of Chuck Jones, Michael Maltese, Maurice Noble, Ken Harris, Ben Washam, Lloyd Vaughn, et al.That Other Scott Adams Comic StripA Butler Eagle reader advocates for the return of Scott Adams. While we can’t help with that we can, with […]
Dale Messick and Brenda Starr, J.C. Leyendecker and the Arrow Collar, Rudolphe Töpffer and the first comic book. [F]or a strip that famously broke a major gender barrier, Brenda Starr spends an inordinate amount of time policing the boundaries of traditional femininity … However pioneering Brenda’s careerism may have been, it would be a mistake […]
Way back one hundred years ago The Los Angeles Times produced a Sunday supplement for and by younger readers it called The Junior Times. That entertainment and educational section ran from July 23, 1922 – July 15, 1934 and our interest in it is that it ran comics by aspiring cartoonists. One such Junior Times […]
Jimmy Dodge-a-Job and the Little Folks of Tumbledown Town Allan Holtz presents us with most wonderful samples of cartooning from 1918. Two full pages of Jimmy Dodge-a-Job from the mysterious James Stewart makes one wonder why he did not reach a justly deserved fame. Teena by Hilda Terry HIlda Terry gained fame more for reasons […]
Blondie Boopadoop, Popeye, Longest-Running Comic Strips, Dennis the Menace, Harold Wilson. Blondie Bumstead, née Boopadoop? Before she married Dagwood Bumstead, Blondie’s name was Blondie Boopadoop. That’s what Wikipedia says, that’s what King Features Syndicate says, that’s what the Library of Congress says. But… was it? Rubbercat.net finds that the prevailing wisdom “while it’s official enough, […]
Oz Black. Plus Thomas Nast, Paul Conrad, Ted Rall, Bill Bramhall, Ann Telnaes, Herblock, Zapiro, Edmund Duffy, Barry Blitt and moreHere in Lincoln by Oz Oswald Ragan “Oz” Black studied art at the University of Nebraska from 1918 to 1923. He went on to document local news 365 days a year for nearly four decades, […]