Dave Coverly, Jim Davis, Bill Plympton, J. C. Duffy, Trina Robbins, Georgia Higley, Peter Maresca.
Bored Panda regularly features small collections of comics, today it is the syndicated Speed Bump.
Bored Panda usually includes a few words from the cartoonist and in this one Dave Coverly is interviewed.
“I have to turn in 7 cartoons every week so I live in the shadow of a looming deadline. The most challenging thing about ‘being funny’ for a living is that life isn’t always funny. A bad day or a sad day really makes it difficult to find anything humorous to write about. So another big part of this job is compartmentalizing and setting aside the external world to concentrate on your internal world. Sometimes you don’t feel funny but you have to at least remember what funny feels like, if that makes sense.”
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As a current library employee, I can report that Garfield books [link added] still fly off the shelves in multiple languages.
At Book Riot Jeffery Davies asks and answers “Why Do Kids Love Garfield Comics?”
There’s something calming about Garfield. Unlike Calvin and Hobbes or The Adventures of Tintin, which employ vast and colorful sceneries, usually paired with adventures, Garfield’s artistry is simple, almost to the point of being dull, in the best way possible. I long for the days when I could read Garfield comics without a care in the world because that’s exactly what he would have expected of me. In the anxious atmosphere that is childhood, Garfield can be mean and nasty, sure, but he also doesn’t ask anything of his readers. The simplicity and repetition, and the comfort that comes with that, is the appeal.
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While on the subject of books and libraries and comics…
On October 31, 2023, Georgia Higley retired from the Library of Congress (LOC) where she had worked for 33 years upon joining the staff as a library intern in 1990. Georgia had been in charge of the Newspapers and Current Periodicals division and had overseen the rebuilding, strengthening, and spotlighting of one of the largest comic book collections in the world and possibly the largest in America. The website for the collection calls it, “The largest publicly available comic book collection in the world is comprised of over 165,000 original print issues and 12,000 different titles that span 1934-present.”
Mike Rhode profiles and covers the retirement of Georgia Higley, “America’s comic book librarian.”
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Acclaimed cartoonist and animator Bill Plympton has made a number of animated films and shorts—including the Oscar-nominated Your Face and several couch gags for The Simpsons—over the course of a storied career, but he considers his upcoming animated feature, Slide, which he wrote, animated, directed, and designed, to be the most personal film he’s ever done.
Mary Fan, for The Work Print, talked to Bill Plympton about his next big project.
Plympton describes Slide, which is decidedly not for children (“It’s not a kids’ film, it’s not a Pixar film, it’s not Disney.”), as the kind of film Mel Brooks would make if he’d been a cartoonist. The main character is a musician called Slide, described as a mysterious, Clint Eastwood-type who plays the slide guitar, which Plympton also plays. While the film is titled after this heroic character, the bad guys are Plympton’s favorite part.
To learn more about Bill Plympton and Slide, visit https://www.plymptoons.com/.
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Digression.
The first round of USPS stamps announced for 2024 do not include honoring any comics or cartoonists.
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J. C. Duffy, of The Fusco Brothers and New Yorker cartoon fame, has a new Substack. (hat tip: Michael Maslin)
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Comic strip history fans should run, not walk, to grab the one indispensable reprint project of this holiday book season, Trina Robbins and Pete Maresca’s Dauntless Dames: High-Heeled Heroes of the Comics (Fantagraphics/Sunday Press, $100). And I don’t mean “indispensable” as a blurb-able critical throwaway, either. The female characters and creators reprinted here from the 1930s and 40s have been “dispensable” in too many histories of the newspaper comic.
Steve Smith, at Panels & Prose reviews the newest BIG (13.2 x 1 x 17 inches, ? 5.45 pounds) comic strip history.
Bored Panda steals content and should not be lauded. At times they have taken as many as 60, yes, I said 60 of my cartoons for an article without my permission. The text is just filler. They want the cartoons as their content. I explained to them that the article should be the thing and a few cartoons should compliment that, not the other way around.
Once the cartoons appear in Bored Panda, other affiliated or non-affiliated sites pick up the same thing and run them, so your 60 cartoons or so appear all over the internet. At one point, I was on 40 sites from the one Bored Panda “article.” Not sure if this is good or bad. Bored Panda is an aggregate site. Nothing more except they don’t link to the content, they take it and publish it as their own.
I will avoid Bored Panda from now on. I am sorry that they did this to you.
Yeah, BP seems to be just a bunch of ripped off content pumped out by some reddit fan boys. Much like boing boing is now too.
Trina Robbins also has an important anthology, WON’T BACK DOWN, coming out in January, 2024.
https://www.comicsbeat.com/trina-robbins-wont-back-down-anthology/
And Dave Coverly is right. It’s very, very hard to draw a funny comic strip when you watch the news. I had to take time off, for a few days. Then I drew the only sad comic strip in the series. It will run on November 11.
Bored Panda is a click bait sight. With lifted content from other sites.