The Concord (New Hampshire) Monitor is moving their Sunday comics from the Sunday magazine to the paper’s broadsheet section. The move is accompanied by changes in the Sunday Funnies line-up. We’ve long published 22 comics in our Sunday magazine. Starting on Sept. 4, we’re cutting that number back to 18, and they’ll be found in […]
Asked and answered, Prickly City (AMS). It’s not so much that he’s defied the law as it is that so many powerful people are willing to twist themselves into knots to justify his behavior, and, if Ex-Dear-Leader were held accountable, the last 30 years of rightwing rabble rousing have brought forth a decentralized army of […]
Folktales are told and retold through the generations with each adding its own twist. The story of Cinderella is one that cartoonist Charles Plumb brought into the 20th century with his newspaper comic strip he called “Ella Cinders.” Charles Plumb was born in 1899 … He worked as an artist on Chautauqua circuits before finding […]
Mason Mastroianni, who draws the B.C., Wizard of Id, and Dogs of C-Kennel comic strips and is also the co-writer on B.C., was interviewed by Tom Ward for The Sports Page Weekly. TW: You work on B.C. and Wizard of Id. How do you divvy up your time to work on each strip? MM: I […]
Rifling through the newspaper to dig out the comic strips will soon be a thing of the past. News Corp Australia has announced it will be dropping cartoon strips from all its mastheads from September 11. The decision by News Corp has disappointed cartoonists who said comic strips were relevant and a way for generations to […]
A day for catching up on various things, and we’ll start with today’s Zits (KFS), in which it turns out Jeremy’s podcast was everything I thought it would be and less. I have no idea how much pain is yet to come, because some threads become part of the strip and others drop and disappear, […]
Today, at 92 the artist/writer is still spry, productive and creative. Currently we are blessed with a new book (actually, two books in one): On the One Hand: The Art & Graphic Stories of R.O. Blechman and On the Other Hand: The Writing of R.O Blechman Published & Unpublished (Fantagraphics). It is a treat for […]
Snoopy [is] scheduled to lift-off during a two-hour window that opens at 8:33 a.m. EDT on Monday, August 29. If all goes to plan they’ll flyby the Moon and eventually return to Earth in the Orion spacecraft 42 days later. This won’t be Snoopy’s first trip to space, having orbited Earth in a Space […]
Golden Age comic book artist Lily Renée Phillips has passed away at age 101. Lily Renée Peters Phillips (née Willheim) May 12, 1921 – August 24, 2022 Lily’s children have notified comics fandom through Trina Robbins: It’s with great sadness that my sister and I regret to inform you of the passing […]
Biden’s decision to cancel a portion of student loan debt is top of the news, and Kevin Siers makes the point that, while it’s not a cure-all, lot of people wanted it to happen. It’s a sign of the times that doing something a lot of people wanted you to do carries a tinge of […]
In 16 months Mickey Mouse‘s official debut* animated cartoon, Steamboat Willie, will go public domain, but The Mouse will remain very much a Disney property. © Disney The iconic character that has come to define the entire Disney brand made his first appearance as the title character in 1928’s Steamboat Willie, which will lapse into […]
Book publishers just spent 3 weeks in court arguing they have no idea what they’re doing On August 22, oral arguments ended in the Justice Department’s antitrust trial to block the book publisher Penguin Random House from merging with rival Simon & Schuster. The result of the trial, which is expected to be decided later […]
Can a caricaturist sell copies of his caricature of Jack Nicholson or any celebrity on T-shirts at some store or over the internet? How about all those caricature prints selling daily on eBay and Etsy? Each case has its own individual facts and facets, but the underlying law that allows public figures to protect the value of their […]
When last we checked in with Bud Fisher he had created the first successful daily newspaper comic strip* Mr. A. Mutt, which debuted on November 15, 1907 in the San Francisco Chronicle. The daily was an instant San Francisco treat and proved to be a great circulation booster for M. H. de Young‘s newspaper, which […]
Today’s Zits (KFS) illustrates the problem I have with podcasts. It’s not that they’re a collection of belches and farts, exactly, but they tend to be just about that rigorous in the way they’re set up and planned out. There’s already a certain amount of ego involved in thinking people want to know what’s on […]