Books Cartooning Comic history Editorial cartooning Events Museums

First Wednesday After the First Tuesday After the First Monday of November (A Cartoonist Roundup)

The other day Mike Peterson featured “a well-crafted homage” cartoon by Daniel Boris in his column. An unfamiliar name to me – but it was a great cartoon for old Warner Bros. animation fans.


© Daniel Boris

Those of us wanting to know more about the cartoonist are rewarded
with an auto-profile by Daniel supplied to Mike Rhode’s Comics DC.

Several years ago, after more than 25 years of working [as a graphic artist], I was laid off and decided to try something completely different. I became a licensed home inspector, and then in late 2018 I became a real estate agent.

During lulls in my real estate business I began creating art again, and it’s the editorial cartooning that I enjoy the most.

 

All Your Racial Problems Will Soon End, a new book collecting the cartoons
of Charles Johnson, is reviewed by Aubrey Gabel for The Comics Journal.

  
© Charles Johnson

The majority of his political cartoons serve as an archive of a politically and socially situated humor: caricatures of the Black Panther Party. Writing as a non-member from Evanston or Stonybrook, Johnson provides a decentered vision of the Party, far from urban chapters in Oakland, Harlem, Washington D.C., and Chicago, and away from the media spotlight of Huey P. Newton, Bobby Seale, Kathleen & Eldridge Cleaver, or even Illinois chair Fred Hampton. While many strips share in their activist sensibilities, Johnson clearly approaches the Panthers from a distance, and his humor is directed both with and at them.

In the comments Michael Kennedy reviews the review:

The coldness within the review reeks of attempts to distance us from the virtuoso talent of Charles Johnson and tag it mostly as an outlier of solely racialised history of some other world whose other signifiers of black political word-picture making don’t currently deserve voice (print).

 

At The Billy Ireland Cartoon Library and Museum they treat comic art as Art.

Olivia Justice, for Boston College’s The Heights writes about
art historian and associate curator Caitlin McGurk talking preservation.

“All of our material is clipped but kept at an environmentally controlled archive … at a steady temperature and humidity monitored at 24 hours a day,” McGurk said. “It’s a very high-security archive. You need swipe access to get back there, which only a few people have.”

Part of the reason that the museum features such high security precautions is that the general public does not pay the kind of attention to comic art that it deserves. The library even struggles with visitors being confused about why certain pieces of art have been saved and preserved.

 

Elsewhere is a Vault of Funnies

The oldest comic book in Virginia Commonwealth University’s Comic Arts Collection is “Histoire de Mr. Crépin,” a rare work from 1837 by the Swiss caricaturist Rodolphe Töpffer, who’s often credited as the creator of the first comic book that same year.

Töpffer’s proto-comic is?only one of the thousands of rare specimens in VCU’s 175,000-item collection, which?includes approximately 65,000 comics — from Capt. Marvel to Mr. Natural — in addition to graphic novels, magazines, scholarly journals, fanzines, minicomics, books about comics, and even “Tijuana bibles.”

 

Don Harrison, at Richmond Magazine, interviews VCU’s senior curator Yuki Hibben.

RM: How did VCU acquire the collection?

Hibben: The collection started in the 1970s with the?donation of materials that belonged to Fred O. Seibel, an editorial cartoonist for the Richmond Times-Dispatch from 1926 to 1968. Dr. M. Thomas Inge, who I mentioned earlier, was teaching in the English department at VCU and championed the expansion of the collection. For several decades, the Comic Arts Collection relied almost entirely on donors such as Dr. Inge and VCU alumnus David Anderson, who?donated our copy of “All Negro Comics” and many others to build the collection.

 

Always a joy to add a previously unlisted cartoonist to our Senior Strippers index.

KAAL-TV, Rochester, Minn., features 92 year old cartoonist Jerry Fearing at a book signing.

[Jerry] calls cartooning a lost art, that is losing the glory it used to enjoy in the past.

“They found so many ways to reproduce drawing and they don’t need a cartoonist around and you don’t see them in the newspapers you take a look at the Sunday paper and it kind of breaks your heart when you see everything reduced down and jammed into four pages,” Fearing said.

 

Another book signing coming up.

 

The Cartoon Art Museum welcomes Brian Fies for a signing of his latest book The Last Mechanical Monster. Fies is cartoonist and creator of Mom’s Cancer, Whatever Happened to the World of Tomorrow, and A Fire Story. Fies will present his Toon Talk at the Cartoon Art Museum on Saturday, November 12th at 1 p.m. in the museum’s Drawing Room, followed by a Q&A and signing in the Bil Keane Lobby until 3 p.m. This event is free and open to the public.

 

What the Heck Is Haptic Cartooning and Why Should You Care?
Cartoonist John P Weiss on the degradation of cartooning with digital tools.


© John P. Weiss

Later in life, when I moonlighted as an editorial cartoonist for several newspapers, I drew my cartoons with pen and India ink, for greater permanency.

Fast-forward to the present day, and I craft most of my online cartoons with an iPad Pro, Apple pencil, and the ProCreate app. It’s so much more efficient than inking on paper and scanning to my computer.

But then I noticed something.

My digital cartoons lacked some of the sketchy detail and abstract charm of my ballpoint pen and paper cartoons.

Drawing on an iPad Pro with an Apple pencil lacks the kind of tactile feeling one experiences when putting pen to paper. Sketching on a glass surface is slippery. There’s no resistance like the sensation felt between pen and paper.

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