On the Comic Strip Scene
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Featuring Greg and Karen Evans, Jamar Nicholas, Jeff Weigel, Dan Thompson, G. B. Trudeau, Peter Arno, and Charles Schulz.
NCS Open House Meet-n-Greet and Member Spotlight
On the other side of this weekend:
Come mingle with current NCS members and others interested in the professional world of cartooning. Open to professionals interested in the NCS–please feel free to share! We’ll get to meet-n-greet each other plus enjoy an interview and Q/A with a current NCS member.
- News and updates from the NCS
- Member Spotlight and Studio Tour Interview plus live Q/A with GREG AND KAREN EVANS (https://www.gocomics.com/luann) hosted by JAMAR NICHOLAS (https://jamarnicholas.weebly.com/)
- Networking Breakouts
The Jeff Weigel Interview, Bonus Round
o celebrate our 300th X-Band: The Phantom Podcast, we had the chance to host a bunch of phans asking newspaper creators Jeff Weigel and Mike Manley questions. Due to the huge amount of questions we received on the night, Jeff and Mike were unable to answer them all. Attached are the extra questions that Jeff Weigel answered for you…
The Chronicle Chamber offers more from The Sunday Phantom comic strip artist Jeff Weigel.
How was it drawing the dailies for a period of time?
Drawing the daily newspaper stories was an interesting experience for reasons I could never quite put my finger on, I found it easier than doing the Sunday strip. Not just because I didn’t have to add color, but somehow laying out a series of dailies felt less complicated than designing a three-tiered Sunday strip. I enjoyed the opportunity to step in for eight weeks (if I remember right), but since I’m semi-retired I was glad to get back to the lighter schedule of just doing the Sundays once my tour of duty on the dailies ended.
Squid Williams in “The Beasts That Roam!”
Dan Thompson, the creator of Rip Haywire, the cartoonist of Brevity, and the puzzler behind KidSpot, has time on his hands so he is putting together a, hopefully, ongoing series starring Squid Williams.
Squid Williams is a sailor, a brawler, and a man who never bets against himself. Imagine Conan the Barbarian traded his sword for a Colt .45 and his war horn for a ship’s whistle. Stuck in the Dragon’s Triangle with pirates, monsters, and a woman full of secrets, he’ll have to fight his way out—or go down swinging.
Dan has opened a Zoop account to bring the project to fruition.
Doonesbury on MAGA’s “Willing Griftees”
In recent decades especially, Trudeau has targeted Republican leaders more often and more intensely than their Democrat colleagues. That said, his satire generally “punches up,” using humour to expose powerful people and hold them to account. Trudeau has rarely gone after everyday GOP voters – or any other type of “everyday American” – in a mean-spirited way. Moreover, some of the most sympathetic Doonesbury characters – B.D. and Lacey and Dick Davenport for starters – are card-carrying Republicans.
Paul Hebert at Reading Doonesbury continues his examination of the Doonesbury Trump comic strips.
This is the second part of my look at Doonesbury’s “Trump Quintet,” Garry Trudeau’s five-volume (and counting?) collection of strips about Donald Trump. Last time out, I examined how Trudeau traced the decades-long cultural and political dynamics that set the stage for a corrupt narcissist to seize the White House. I concluded by noting that while Trudeau had historically shown moments of empathy for two presidents whom he’d attacked the hardest – Nixon and Regan[sic] – his Trump cartoons deny their subject any sense of humanity: Doonesbury’s Trump is the man reduced to his grotesque, monstrous core. In this post, I’m going to look at how Trudeau’s depictions of Trump supporters underline a widespread liberal frustration with, and ultimately disdain for, those Americans whose cult-like devotion to a profoundly problematic leader puts democracy at risk.
The Syndicated Peter Arno
In 2016, when I first wrote of some twelve of Peter Arno’s prints created for the New York Post, I had little idea what the cryptic images sent out to readers as a part of a promotion were all about. Certainly, as stand-alone cartoons, they were not of the quality of his New Yorker work by a long shot. But what exactly were they?
Stephen Nadler at Attempted Bloggery digs into the 1930s newspaper puzzles of Peter Arno.
… To further complicate matters, the contest was nationally syndicated and appeared in newspapers all over the country. The prints seem to have been offered in series of twelve, sometimes with the sponsoring newspaper’s logo at the bottom of each and sometimes not. Contests may have appeared across the country on different days and in different orders. And even the contest itself had variable titles. It wasn’t always “Famous Names.” I’m not sure the New York Post had a name for it at all…
Peanuts At The 2025 Comic-Con
While details are scarce, Melissa Menta, Senior Executive of Global Brand and Communitions for Peanuts Worldwide LLC, confirmed on a recent episode of the Word Balloon Comics Podcast that the franchise will be returning to the convention this year.
The SDCC Unofficial Blog has the sparse details.
This happens to be a big year for Peanuts, as it celebrates 75th Anniversary — so we’d be shocked if that didn’t play heavily into this year’s theme. Peanuts has long been a Comic-Con staple, with a fan-favorite booth offering exclusive merch (you can scope out some of last year’s offerings here), and an annual offsite typically at 200 J. Street.
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