We’ll start with a pair of Thanksgiving family thoughts from Dennis the Menace and The Family Circus about the same relative that followed closely on the Comics Kingdom feed. One thankfully, one wistfully.
Then the day after Thanksgiving came Flo and Friends and The Flying McCoys with one following on the heels of the other on the GoComics feed with the same gag. One a bit more exaggerated.
The other day we made note of the 1985 Calvin and Hobbes press kit…
and I got intrigued by that wraparound cover.
That idea/scenario has been re-imagined by Bill Watterson – below for a German book of early strips:
But I can’t find that original press kit illustration being used anywhere else. Is the Press kit the only place to find that exact drawing? Has it never been used anywhere else?
Foreign cartoonists catering to the U.S. market?
Surprised that a couple comic strip from outside the United States celebrated Thanksgiving on November 28. Insanity Streak by Australian Tony Lopes and WuMo by the Danish duo of Mikael Wulff and Anders Morgenthaler both marked the U.S. holiday with more than one comic surrounding Thanksgiving DAy.
The comic strip WuMo is rarely funny and usually stupid. However, the one The Plain Dealer published on Wednesday, Nov. 13 [link added], about the cat installing a guillotine over the dog door is actually offensive and disturbing.
While in New Orleans at The Times-Picayune:
Don’t be bullied into cancelling the Mallard Fillmore comic strip [emphasis and link added] because some readers don’t find it funny.
I don’t think Doonesbury is funny, or thoughtful, but I won’t demand that it be removed from your paper. I will simply not read it.
I find Froma Harrop’s columns ridiculous and insulting to many readers. However, I won’t act like a petulant child and dictate that you censor your paper. Frank and Ernest are hilarious. I hope it isn’t in the crosshairs, too.
Up north people are writing letters to The Bangor Daily News about The Phantom:
In response to the recent letter to the Bangor Daily News, ” Time for a different comic strip” on Nov. 19:
No! No! No! Please do not get rid of “The Phantom.” I, too, have read “The Phantom” over many years. Lee Falk is one of the only people writing about the dangers of artificial intelligence and Elon Musk’s (character Ian Mollusk’s) influence in high government places. Very provocative, and timely.
Staying up New England way:
What a privilege to work with an artist of Mike Manley’s caliber—and Jeff Weigel’s on the Sunday narrative. Jeff’s art to be published in May has been coming in over the transom in recent days. What a talent! Readers are going to miss these guys when the gig goes away, as it surely will. The untouchable Mollusks of the world are stealing what we do and loading it into their AI profit centers, baby. Redistributing income up the ladder is the operative ethic.
In a Musk send-up, you knew we were going to get to AI…
The Phantom writer Tony DePaul expounds on the latest daily comic strip adventure of The Ghost Who Walks (started here) at his Nickels of the Man blog explaining to those unaware that comic strips are created weeks, sometimes months, ahead of the time they are published in newspapers or are seen on their websites.
We may have seemed to be executing the story around the dominant event of the year, the November 5 election, but, the fact is, the story was written, penciled and inked before Musk morphed into Trump’s stunt double at his bloviating worst. The strips to be published November 18 through 23, the story’s closing week, were transmitted to our subscribing newspapers two weeks before the election.
I’m told our audacity in lampooning Musk wounded the reddest of the red hats among our readership…
Our final two-fer for today:
For those of you who haven’t got the original edition of Glenn Fleishman‘s highly praised How Comics Were Made, in six months a new hardcover edition from Andrews McMeel, retitled How Comics Are Made, will be available.