Everybody’s going out an’ having fun

Sez Keefer:

The Orange Dotard’s trip to Arlington National Cemetery and the foolishness that ensued reminded me on this classic strip by Cat cartoonist B. Kliban. I had to pay homage.

Keith Knight is having fun with a cartoon classic. Check out Keith Knight’s Substack where he posts the above (th)ink cartoon and the original. Compare them and see just how close Keith came to transfering Kliban’s characters to his own panel.

Still with the classics but not so fun was (is) the Percy Crosby – Skippy Peanut Butter matter. It came to mind today when reading the GoComics re-posting of the July 13, 1936 Skippy comic strip by Percy Crosby.

I wondered if Crosby purposely left out a peanut butter reference out of the above strip. Turns out that in 1936 there is reason to believe the cartoonist thought the matter had been taken care of, and it wouldn’t for another dozen years before the major assault on his creation would take place.

The action has taken on a blistering speed in Bangalla.

I hate to keep picking on The Phantom but it just seems that there is more filler than story anymore.

Union Comics

I was a Teamster for just about the entirety of my adult working life, and toward the end it was the union that kept the new boss (who was NOT like the old boss) from getting rid of about half of us.

Lefty Comics presents a bunch of Barry Deutsch union comic strips. The main page has more commie comics.

Elswhere…

The New Yorker‘s Sept. 9, 2024 cover [link added] featuring nannies has people talking on social media.

The scene, created by cartoonist R. Kikuo Johnson [emphasis added], shows women of different races watching kids at the playground.

Distractify examines the social media feedback about the latest New Yorker cover.

Someone else said, “I admit, at first look, I just thought it was showing normal, blended families. Upon a second glance, ‘Oh yeah, rich white people having their kids safely raised by the help,’ the folks they don’t pay enough and want to deport.”

While we’re at the magazine rack:

I don’t remember when I picked up my first issue of MAD. But by the time I was 10 years old, in 1971, I was a rabid fan, waiting religiously for each new issue. The peak of my MADness coincided with the magazine’s greatest success. Its bestselling issue ever, No. 161 (September 1973), was one of my prize possessions: The cover, a spoof of The Poseidon Adventure, showed a drowning Alfred E. Neuman with his skinny legs sticking out of a life preserver. MAD taught me all about pubescent snark, but also about hippies, beatniks, advertising executives, the military-industrial complex, sex, pollution, politics, and other grown-up subjects. Most of all, it showed me that wisecracking could be a royal road to cultural literacy. (Cartoonist Alan Moore recalls that, after discovering MAD as an 8-year-old in the early ’60s, he astonished his parents with his banter about Caroline Kennedy, Fidel Castro, and Jimmy Hoffa.) MAD’s cackling satire was aimed in every direction, including its own writers and artists, known as the Usual Gang of Idiots, as well as its snot-nosed readers, who were mostly kids like me.

Tabloid presents David Mikics’ introduction to “The MAD Files: Writers and Cartoonists on the Magazine that Warped America’s Brain!” (release date September 3). The book features twenty-six essays and comics by Mary Fleener, Ivan Cohen, Geoffrey O’Brien, Roz Chast, Tim Kreider, Peter Kuper, Grady Hendrix, R. Crumb, Art Spiegelman, Frank Jacobs, R. Sikoryak, Liel Leibovitz, Mary-Lou Weisman, Leah Garrett, Michael Benson, Daniel Bronstein, Nathan Abrams, David Hajdu, Clifford Thompson, Bonnie Altucher, Sarah Boxer, Max Andersson, Adam Gopnik, Rachel Shteir, Chris Ware, and Jonathan Lethem and Mark Allen.

And poor Travis is “staying home and having none.”

If you were wondering where the title of this post came from. My first thought reading Scary Gary‘s first panel.

_{feature image from here (that’s definitely NOT the recommended version)}