A Tuesday Assortment
Skip to comments
An existential threat to Kentucky’s community newspapers
Yeah, big newspapers that are part of big groups are turning their potential readers off by moving the news editors to out of town newsrooms that don’t care about local news. But Linda Boileau‘s cartoon above for The State Journal brings our attention to the smaller locally owned newspapers and their increasingly difficult challenge to stay profitable and alive.
Kentucky’s House of Representatives has introduced a bill to change a law that guarantees some income to local newspapers. From WEKU:
The CEO of a company that publishes nine newspapers in eastern Kentucky said a bill passed by the state House of Representatives would hurt not only local newspapers, but also the public they serve. Jay Nolan said HB 368 would do away with a 50-plus year-old state law requiring local governments to publish legal and meeting notices in their newspaper of record. Instead, they could put them on their websites.
More from Kentucky Lantern: An existential threat to Kentucky’s community newspapers
The Comic Art of Jimmy Swinnerton
An impressive collection of comics historians gather for a panel discussion on one of the founders of newspaper comics – Jimmy Swinnerton.
How comics pioneer James “Jimmy” Swinnerton finally got his due.
James “Jimmy“ Swinnerton is one of the most creative, respected and prolific comic artists from the first half of the 20th century — yet his work has seen little reproduction until this year. Jimmy!, new from Sunday Press Books, re-introduces Swinnerton’s six-decade career in comics.
The team behind the new volume — publisher Pete Maresca, co-editor Michael Tisserand, and contributors Paul C. Tumey, Eddie Campbell and Rick Marschall — will discuss what Swinnerton’s life and work means to comics.
The 417th meeting of the NY Comics & Picture-story Symposium will be held on Tuesday, March 18, 2025 at 7 pm EDT. ONLINE PRESENTATION VIA ZOOM. Please email comicssymposium@gmail.com to register for this event. Free and open to the public.
MTG Triggered by Cartoon of AOC and Jasmine
There was an animated cartoon of AOC and Jasmine Crockett beating a Rebublican that sent Marjorie Taylor Greene into a tizzy (I say apparently because the only evidence I find is extreme right wing sites and people mentioning it).
Marjorie Taylor Greene has seemingly been triggered by a cartoon, but spoiler alert, it’s not the one who sits behind the Resolute Desk.
The fierce Donald Trump loyalist recently took to social media to react to a stick figure cartoon shared by Jasmine Crockett. It shows two animated figures, named as Crockett and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, beating down on a third cartoon human labelled as “Republicans.”
British cartoonist detained at US border
Here is the latest news on Rebecca Burke that Mike Peterson mentioned earlier today:
A British comic artist has spent almost a fortnight locked in an immigration detention facility in the United States after a “visa mix-up” during a backpacking trip.
Burke, from Portskewett, Monmouthshire, started a four-month trip on January 7, spending time in New York and Seattle before attempting to enter Canada.
During a segment of her trip in the US, she stayed with a host family who provided food and accommodation in return for her doing basic household tasks.
She was planning to stay with a family in Vancouver under a similar arrangement, organised through the website Workaway, a forum for “cultural exchanges”.
The circumstances appear to have concerned Canadian border officials, who believed that she may have been entering the country to work illegally.
After being denied entry, Burke was placed in a cell by American officials who spent hours questioning her and pondering whether what she had done constituted work.
They say never meet your heroes, but then…
When I was just starting out as a cartoonist I was voraciously eating up any knowledge I could find about the art of ink penmanship.
There was no internet back then so books were the only real source of research and I used to pour over Ralph Steadman’s work in particular.
I just couldn’t figure out how he got his cross hatching so small and his lines so tight. I searched out thinner and thinner ink nibs and tighter and tighter paper, but I just couldn’t get close to mastering his techniques.
It was only years later, at an exhibition of his work, that I realised it wasn’t the tightness of his work that gave him such intricate inking at all. It was the fact that he worked on an enormous scale.
Guy Venables tells of his admiration for Ralph Steadman and of meeting the artist.
At this point I feel it’s only fair to explain that 88-year-old Ralph Steadman, to us other cartoonists, is someone who has ascended the mere day to day drudgery of cartooning (he was once a day to day spot cartoonist, creating small, standalone illustrations under the shortened name of ‘Stead’) and has risen up to become an advanced species, a renaissance hybrid of cartooning, high art, literature and absurdity.
A Note From Patrick on a New MUTTS Picture Book
Every book begins with a tiny spark — an idea, a feeling, a memory that lingers. These are gifts from the universe.
My new MUTTS picture book, coming out this fall, was born from an offhand comment my niece made at Thanksgiving in 2023. She told me how much she loved my first children’s book, The Gift of Nothing, and suggested that maybe there was more to say about gifts from the heart.
“How about The Gift of Something?” she said.
I laughed and told her that it was a cute idea. And after a few days of thinking about it, I realized it was more than just “cute.”
Patrick McDonnell talks about a new,original Mutts book.
feature image by Klon Waldrip
Comments 4