Cartoonists in the News Roundup & Updates
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Reuben Award nominee Jeff Smith, Reuben Award nominee Bill Griffith and Reuben Award-winner Ernie Bushmiller, Zapiro, courtroom sketch artists Bill Hennessy and Christine Cornell, Darrin Bell, Alison Bechdel, and Dale Hrabi & Kagan McLeod are among the cartoonists in the news in today’ weekend roundup.
Reuben Award nominee Jeff Smith‘s college comic strip Thorn is being collected.
Bleeding Cool shares the good news:
While Bone creator Jeff Smith attended the Ohio State University, he created a comic strip called “Thorn” for the student newspaper, The Lantern, which included some of the characters who later featured in Bone. There was a partial collection, with a thousand print run, but nothing since Bone became a big thing.
Now Jeff Smith has tweeted the news, “There’s never been a complete reprinting of my proto-Bone college strips…but that’s about to change. We’ll make an official announcement soon!”
Ohio State has more information about Jeff Smith’s comic strip for The Lantern.
One master of comics arts pays tribute to another in this inventive graphic biography of Ernie Bushmiller (1905–1982), creator of the long-running strip Nancy. Griffith (Zippy the Pinhead) and his Zen surrealist nonchalance might seem an odd fit for the ostensibly square Bushmiller. He certainly plays with form, inserting himself into the narrative and rearranging Bushmiller’s artwork—but he’s earnest about Nancy: “the perfect expression of what comics are.”
A long time coming – here’s The Daily Cartoonist sneak preview from four years ago!
Zapiro Interviewed
I don’t get out of the country much, but as partner Mike features Jonathan Shapiro (pen name: Zapiro) on occasion here’s an exception.
Look, any joke, any humour, any satire is actually based on surprise, because what one is doing is you’re taking the eye and the mind for a walk, and you are coming to a different and surprising conclusion – which comes very quickly and either makes you laugh or angry or just think, oh, gee, I never thought about that. Or it’s hang on a second, that’s exactly what I did think about but I hadn’t found a way to articulate it. So that’s what I’m looking for.
A good cartoon is one that will do that, whichever of those kind of outcomes I get from it. Perhaps a really great cartoon will be one that then does that for so many people that it actually results in some kind of shift.
MoneyWeb interviews “one of South Africa’s most renowned cartoonists and social commentators.”
Courtroom Cartoonists
The truth is that the profession of courtroom satirist has been dying out over the years and the latest twist in the script comes with the entry of cameras into hearings, as more courts decide to start allowing them in their rooms.
He says, “We have been dying for 50 years.” For her, the profession is “anachronistic” and she feels like a “dinosaur”, although she believes strongly in the need for new generations of cartoonists to continue, especially in the face of the “threat” of cameras.
World Nation News talks to Bill Hennessy and Christine Cornell about their dying art.
Bell once set aside political cartooning for more than 10 years. A cartoon he drew in the days after 9/11 depicting two of the hijackers in Bin Laden-style turbans sparked outrage when it appeared in The Daily Californian. But what got to Bell most wasn’t the hundred-plus Students for Justice for Palestine who occupied the school newspaper’s offices, protesting the cartoon as offensive to Muslims, it was a phone call from the mother of a Sikh boy, who said that the cartoon had hurt her son by making him a target of hate.
Disturbed, Bell chose to focus on his daily strips until George Zimmermann shot 17-year-old Trayvon Martin in 2012…
Hillary Louise Johnson talks to and profiles Darrin Bell for Sactown Magazine.
It was first depicted in the comic strip that started Bechdel’s career, Dykes to Watch Out For — a cult favorite that depicted the real experiences of lesbian life and community.
The strip ran from 1983 to 2008. Now, Bechdel is returning to these characters in an audio adaptation of the comic strip, also called Dykes to Watch Out For.
So from comic strip to podcast, I’m so curious — what does that process even look like?
Yeah, doesn’t that sound crazy? How would you make a comic strip into something that’s just audio? Because the whole point of a comic strip is it’s visual. I was sort of taken aback when this idea first got broached.
Jenn Jaracki, for Vermont Public, interviews Alison Bechdel about the audio version of her comic strip.
The Wall Street Journal goes the graphic journalism route.
Download a free PDF of The Nib magazine’s Work issue
A free digital copy of The Nib.
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