DD Degg has the full roundup of Reubens winners here, but I thought I’d provide a taste of times they’ve appeared in Comic Strip of the Day.
Maria Scrivan actually won for greeting cards, but her line and sense of color give her panel, Half Full, a greeting card feel, and I have a feeling that it would probably end up on more refrigerators and cash registers if modern refrigerators hadn’t somehow become modified so that magnets only stick on the sides and cash registers reduced to sizes too small to add clippings.
Even on her off days, Half Full is worth a stop just to look at it.
Rob Rogers was a sentimental favorite in the editorial cartoon category, given what his former employer put him through in an effort of make him illustrate their talking points instead of his opinions. But he’s been a regular at CSotD for much longer than that.
Dave Blazek’s Loose Parts, too, has graced these pages often, and I had to sort through a lot of panels before I came up with these three, the first of which predates the blog entirely and was simply in my file of favorites.
Wallace the Brave is a relatively new strip, which is the only reason I don’t have a large backlog of examples. There is a sort of Cul de Sac/Calvin and Hobbes feel to it, but the characters and setting are distinctive enough that those strips seem more like influences on the cartoonist than actual models for the strip.
And Stephan Pastis has been cracking me up for years with Pearls Before Swine, so the first two of these predate the blog, and one of them earns Pastis an extra sample strip for “yes, and that, too,” which is only fair because he won the only award last night that really is called a “Reuben,” and is for the cartoonist of the year.
