More Cartoonists in the News

Pat Moriarty, Hugh Kilpatrick III, Charlie Hall, Quino and Malfalda, Anton van Dalen (obit), and Mary Wings (obit).

Cartoonist Pat Moriarty Goes Nuclear with Billboard

You might have seen the disconcerting, colorful billboard while driving down 6th Avenue in Tacoma.

The cartoon illustration shows what looks like a scared kid with an ice-cream cone standing next to weapons of mass destruction. On the bottom right, a map displays Tacoma’s proximity to “Subase Bangor,” also known as Naval Base Kitsap-Bangor.

Simone Carter for The News Tribune reports on one of the Ground Zero billboards around Puget Sound.

Pat Moriarty, the comic-book artist behind the billboard’s cartoon, sounded the alarm about the area’s proximity to nuclear weapons.

“I’d like to think if my neighbors knew, they would be concerned about getting rid of them,”

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From Architecture to Cartooning

Although Hugh Kilpatrick III’s background is in architecture, one of his favorite pastimes has always putting a smile on the faces of others, particularly by developing and drawing cartoon panels.

So after retiring from his original field, Kilpatrick – who lives with his wife in Northport, Alabama – decided to pursue a full-time career as a cartoonist.

Haskel Burns for The Pine Belt News profiles Hugh Kilpatrick III.

Kilpatrick’s single-panel cartoons, which can be found online at www.hughkilpatrickcartoonist.com and in some publications throughout his area, focus on light humor, rather than on political or caustic topics.

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Charlie Hall: Comic and Cartoonist

Rhode Island residents may recognize Charlie Hall’s name from his cartoons published in newspapers across the state, his comedy sketch show or his double act “Aging Disgracefully.” Perhaps they know him from his opening acts for Jerry Seinfeld, Kool & the Gang and Jon Stewart, his appearances on shows like Star Search or the lyrics he penned for the Rhode Island state song: “Rhode Island’s It for Me.”

Hall — whose comics have appeared in the Beacon for over 20 years — says all his pursuits “came up like parallel careers,” feeding into one another as his star rose throughout New England and beyond.

Anisha Kumar at The Warwick Beacon profiles Charlie Hall -comedian, cartoonist, and state song composer.

When creating his cartoons, Hall typically reads through local news, picking a few issues that jump out at him to turn into cartoons every week. He first draws his cartoons in pen and ink, then scans them and uses digital tools to shade the drawings. Sometimes, Hall said, he works from 4 p.m. to 2 a.m. on just two cartoons.

Recently, Hall’s comics were selected for exhibition at the Warwick Center for the Arts’ “Comics, Cartoons & Graphic Novels” show opening in August. After paging through his extensive catalog, he selected three comics where he admired both his comedy and his crosshatching.

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Mafalda At 60 Is Just As (Im)Pertinent As Ever

The Argentine comic strip, who is now about to get its own Netflix series, was created at a time when Latin America was going through political censorship. A testament to Mafalda’s innocent-but-serious attitude toward world problems, an excellent example of how young people often see more clearly than the rest of us.

Irene Caselli for World Crunch celebrates 60 years of Quino’s Malfalda.

Mafalda was first published on September 29, 1964 — 60 years ago. Created by Joaquín Salvador Lavado Tejón, better known as Quino, the comic focuses on an outspoken, precocious child living with her middle class family in Buenos Aires. She has a tortoise that is named Bureaucracy.

Like Charles Schultz’s Peanuts and the famous Charlie Brown, the comic focuses on a group of characters — but Mafalda is much more political and cynical, yet hopeful.

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Anton van Dalen – RIP (November 11, 1938 – June 25, 2024)

Anton van Dalen, who documented the East Village from grittiness through gentrification with a distinctive, graphic vernacular, died at home in the neighborhood to which he dedicated his life on June 25 at the age of 86.

The artist graduated from the Amsterdamse Grafische School in 1954; that same year, his family fled for Toronto. In 1966, van Dalen arrived in his beloved East Village.

Lisa Yin Zhang writes the obituary for Hyperallergic. The recent New York Times obit is here.

Artist Anton van Dalen is mention here because:

Van Dalen found community not just through happenstance, but through dogged effort. A two-to-three-year process of dialing a number he found for New Yorker cartoonist Saul Steinberg in a phone book finally led to an assistantship, a position that lasted three decades.

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Mary Wings – RIP (April 14, 1949 – July3, 2024)

She was the first openly gay woman to write a comic book about lesbians. She went on to write detective novels with a queer woman in the lead.

As a footloose illustrator who moved among creative scenes on both coasts and even in Europe in the late 1960s, she hoped to find fellow artists whose work represented her experience — especially in underground comics, with their boundary-bursting depictions of sexuality in all its many forms.

Except that she didn’t. Perusing the work of R. Crumb and other comic artists, she discovered page after page of violent misogyny and homophobia. She also encountered those characteristics in person when she met some of the artists in real life.

Clay Risen for The New York Times writes the obituary.

One day in 1973 she found a comic collection, Wimmen’s Comix, which included a stunning story called “Sandy Comes Out,” about a young woman who announces one day that she is gay.

But as she read it, her enthusiasm wilted. She felt the author, a straight woman named Trina Robbins, had failed to capture the texture of coming out.

That night, back at home, she went to work with her pen and paper, and a week later she emerged with Come Out Comix, her own version of the sort of story Ms. Robbins had tried to tell. It was the first comic book about lesbians, by a lesbian and for lesbians.