Thank Gallimaufry It’s Friday
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Presenting a duke’s mixture of cartoonist and comics related news items.
With Lent and a period of self-sacrifice quickly approaching we feast on a glut of funny as New Orleans cartoonist Walt Handelsman and The Times-Picayune present a selection of Fat Tuesday cartoons Walt has drawn through the years.
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When the News-Sun announced it was cutting the Sunday comics because of cost-cutting measures, it hurt… a lot. A lot more than I think I ever expected.
Sunday mornings lost a lot of their magic when Calvin and Hobbes disappeared into that bright, white yonder and they lost even more when the Sunday strips went the way of the dodo.
The demise of the local newspaper has been an agonizing, lingering death spanning decades with the introduction of the Internet and hastened by the invent of social media.
Local news isn’t dead. It’s on life support and the state of society is trying really hard to pull the plug.
Levi Hill at The News-Sun compares losing the local newspapers to losing Calvin and Hobbes.
It’ll be a very sad day when local newspapers, like Calvin and Hobbes, disappear into that white yonder, but like Calvin, I have some hope that local news still has a world of possibilities before it.
Join your local newspaper and let’s go exploring 2024 together!
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Bill Griffith is a big Nancy fan. He is a newspaper comics artist himself, having written Zippy the Pinhead for fifty years.
Griffith’s new book is a graphic biography of the creator of Nancy. It’s called Three Rocks: The Story of Ernie Bushmiller. It’s a beautiful appreciation of Bushmiller’s work.
Jesse Thorn interviews Bill Griffith for NPR radio.
Bill Griffith joins the show to talk about the book and the long-lasting impact that Nancy has had on comics. He also gets into his work as a comic artist and shares some stories about his strip Zippy the Pinhead.
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Despite being smaller than Vancouver, Toronto, Montreal, and Calgary, Edmonton has a fan base that can fight right alongside them regarding how much they adore and support their hockey team.
It’s a fun time to be an Oilers fan, and even better for two specific fans who have dedicated thousands of hours creating hand-drawn comics and cartoons that do everything from recapping games to capturing inside jokes among the fan base.
These are the stories behind the unofficial cartoonists of the Oilers.
Meet the unofficial cartoonists of the Edmonton Oilers
Preston Hodgkinson at the Daily Hive profiles a couple Oiler fans who are also cartoonists.
Wendy Lam [“a freelance artist by trade”] became a fan of the Oilers back in the post-glory years of the team in the 1990s. Her family wasn’t particularly into sports but the love of the game rubbed off on her from her cousins, who were big fans of the Oilers.
Another fan who has chosen to show his fandom through cartoons is Lance Maxwell [who “got into the cartoon business as a young man, creating comics for his local papers” is a] teacher from Grandview, Manitoba, who has a penchant for all types of artistic expression.
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The Billy Ireland Cartoon Library & Museum presents Depicting Mexico and Modernism, the first retrospective on the comic strip Gordo. On view Dec. 13, 2023–May 5, 2024, the exhibit celebrates the dazzling artistry of Mexican-American cartoonist Gustavo ‘Gus’ Arriola.
Raghav Raj for The Lantern reviews, with pictures, The Billy Ireland’s current Gus Arriola exhibit.
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A Rhode Island-based comic strip got canned from the Providence Journal. Then the letters came.
Fans of Will Henry’s “Wallace the Brave” stood up to corporate consolidation — and won.
Peter Chianca at Boston.com reports on The Return of Wallace – to The ProJo at least.
But to some of the comic strip’s loyal local readers, it apparently hurt a lot — and they reached out to each other on social media to commiserate, and to the newspaper to complain.
“It was definitely the silver lining to the whole fiasco to find out that there was this hardcore group of readers that were really upset to see the comic leave, and they were very vocal about it,” Will says. “And they let the Providence Journal know that they wanted to see the comic. They wanted to see Wallace.
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