The Gang’s All Here!, Breaking Cat News, Mafalda, The K Chronicles, Half Full/Nat, Dennis the Menace², and Non Sequitur.
12-year-old cartoonist draws for South Sioux City newspaper
SOUTH SIOUX CITY, Neb. (KCAU) — Alvaro Galindo Jr. has been drawing for over two years now for the South Sioux City newspaper Mundo Latino, starting when he was just 10 years old.
Galindo draws one comic strip per week, which takes him anywhere from 30 minutes to an hour to make.
KCAU-TV reporter Aveya Hannan interviews 12-year-old published newspaper cartoonist Alvaro Galindo Jr. about his comic strip The Gang’s All Here! and about his career. Transcript here.
He also said he wants to continue drawing comic strips for years to come, and when he is older he hopes to become an author or illustrator.
Looks like he has a future in comics.
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Georgia Dunn and the Ghost Stories of Breaking Cat News
Meet local Snohomish cartoonist, author, and illustrator Georgia Dunn, the creator of Breaking Cat News books and daily comics. Georgia will speak about her nationally syndicated newspaper strip, Breaking Cat News, as seen in The Seattle Times and other papers nationwide!
Breaking Cat News cartoonist Georgia Dunn will be at the Snohomish (WA) Library November 9, 2024.
She will also share some ghostly stories from the Breaking Cat News universe and talk about what makes a good ghost story.
Georgia has an annual Halloween habit and this year will be no different (“Killer Roombas From Outer Space”).
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Quino’s global classic MAFALDA is finally coming to the US
At long last the entirety of Quino’s classic Argentine comic strip Mafalda will receive worldwide English release. Published by Elsewhere Editions and translated by Frank Wynne, the first of five planned 120-page hardcover volumes will hit shelves April 8, 2025.
Dean Simons at The Beat brings us (and U.S.) the good news that famed Mafalda has learned English.
Created by Quino (real name: Joaquín Salvador Lavado Tejón), Mafalda is a comic strip that ran in magazines and newspapers in Argentina from September 1964 to June 1973 … A heady mixture of wholesome gags interspersed with biting satire and social commentary, the themes in the strip included progressivism, feminism, humanism, democracy, and world peace.
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“Everything in this strip I took from somewhere else” (a confession!!)
So Keith Knight who were you’re influences?
The K Chronicles, as seen at Daily Kos, details the Keith Knight style and how he arrived at it.
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Maria Scrivan is reliving middle school so you don’t have to
Reading through Maria Scrivan’s “Nat Enough” graphic novel series — she’s written and drawn five for Scholastic/Graphix since 2020, with a sixth on the way this spring — one thing quickly becomes clear: Middle school must have been pretty rough for Maria Scrivan.
Since getting her start with her hilarious single-panel comic “Half Full,” which is syndicated nationally by Andrews McMeel Universal, Scrivan has thrown herself into her graphic novel work, and the result seems to have been as much fun for her readers as for herself
For Boston.com Peter Chianca interviews author/cartoonist Maria Scrivan.
I started out with magazines. And then actually, I started out going to the New Yorker, and I went every Tuesday. I didn’t get in [the magazine], but then I had a stack of comics, so I went and pitched [those] to syndicates. It was kind of neat that it worked out that way because I love colorful things and bright colors. It was a perfect fit for me to be in the newspaper, and I think my 8-year-old brain blew up the first time I saw my comic in the newspaper.
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People are baffled by how different ‘Dennis the Menace’ looks in America
When you close your eyes and picture the cartoon character ‘Dennis the Menace’ what do you see?
Is it a dark-haired boy in a red and black striped jumper or a cherubic scamp with a baseball glove who terrorised Mr. Wilson?
Eve Wagstaff for The Mirror compares the two Dennis the Menace characters from the British point of view.
On March 12, 1951, two separate comics entitled Dennis the Menace went on sale, one in the UK, and one in the US. The creators did not know about each other, had never spoken, and had no reason to pick that exact same day.
UK Dennis first appeared in Beano #452 and was created by David Law. It was published by D.C. Thomson as part of a comic strip inside of the popular comedy comic book. Meanwhile, his U.S. equivalent was created by Hank Ketcham and distributed by Post-Hall Syndicate as part of a comic strip for a newspaper.
And although the two characters share a name and a fondness for striped clothing, it’s clear their personalities are extremely different.
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10 Best Single-Panel Non Sequitur Comics, Ranked
Wiley Miller’s Non Sequitur is a popular comic strip that, like fellow newspaper comics Mother Goose and Grimm, alternates between the antics of a few recurring characters and single-panel gags reminiscent of The Far Side. While the adventures of the Pyle family can be very entertaining, the one-off jokes in Non Sequitur can be just as memorable, even when they use one-shot characters.
If you think you know the funniest Non Sequitur comics from its 32 year history, you’d be wrong.
Raphe Burstein at CBR has the definitive list of the ten funniest Non Sequitur comics by Wiley.
feature image by Maria Scrivan (Half Full)
I’ve been looking for a place to post, and this looks like a good one: I noticed today that Bug Martini has resumed. [edited to add: https://www.bugmartini.com/ ]
Thanks for pointing this out, DD. I had no idea this was being done. I’d love to know just how he decided on these cartoons as “the 10 best”, given the volume of material one would have to go through. And it should be noted that it’s entirely his opinion, not a universal truth. Nonetheless, I really appreciate it.