Sunday Morning Reads
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Art Spiegelman biography and career timeline
As a prelude to their airing of the Art Spiegelman: Disaster is My Muse documentary on April 15, 2025 PBS presents a “timeline [that] explores Art Spiegelman’s life and the major milestones in his career” from his birth in 1948 to 2025’s collaboration with Joe Sacco on “Never Again and Again.”
Canada’s 2024 Best Seller: Dog Man:The Scarlet Shredder
Dog Man: The Scarlet Shedder by Dav Pilkey topped the English-language print book charts in Canada last year, according to a research report released by BookNet Canada this week.
For the seventh year running, two out of every five print books sold in 2024 in both the English-language and French-language markets were either juvenile or young adult titles. Juvenile books made up 50% of Canadian library circulations in 2024.
Doonesbury on Trump, Madness, and Rape
Last time out…
I ended by noting an observation that Trudeau made in the preface to Day One Dictator, the most recent volume in his ever-growing collection of comics about America in the time of Trumpism. The book was nearly titled Day One Dementia: put together, the competing titles draw attention to something compounding Trumpism’s threat to American democracy. MAGA fanaticism, Trudeau argues, blinds Trump supporters to something obvious to even the most casual observer: the fact that Trump is losing his mind.
Part Three of Paul Hébert’s treatise on Garry B. Trudeau‘s nearly forty year fascination with Donald Trump as portayed in Trudeau’s Doonesbury comic strip since 1987 (Part One here; Part Two here).
As the 2024 election approached, Trudeau returned to Trump’s mental state, but shifted his focus away from Trump’s psychopathology to his clearly diminishing cognitive abilities. An 14 April 2024 strip finds Trump upset because the results of a cognitive test he had recently “aced” weren’t mentioned in a speech he was set to deliver. Trump’s henchman Trfff tells his boss that by “constantly talking about” his cognitive tests, he ends up sounding “a bit demented.” Trump’s reply is loaded with the kinds of linguistic mishaps that can be symptomatic of cognitive struggles: instead of saying “dementia,” he uses the word “dimension” (“No-one knows more about dimension than me!”); stumbling over the word “vote,” he claims that his supporters “do the ballot so powerfully.”
This summer, the United States Mint (Mint) will kick off a new coin and medal series celebrating comic book art as a uniquely American artform.
This three-year series, from 2025 through 2027, will produce collectible coins and medals featuring three iconic DC Super Heroes who reflect American values and culture. Superman, Batman, and Wonder Woman will be the first characters featured, followed by an additional six DC Super Heroes.
The three designs will be struck each year in gold and silver, with matching clad medal sets available later in the year or early the following year…
The United States Mint announces the DC coin set is in the final stages.
Twin Ports Festival of [Comic] History
In 1942, a cartoonist was born in Cloquet. Twenty years later, another was born in Duluth. During this year’s Twin Ports Festival of History, Carl Gawboy and Chris Monroe will come together to talk about their work as small-town newspaper cartoonists.
Rain Newcomb for the Duluth News Tribune profiles cartoonists Carl Gawboy and Chris Monroe in anticipation of the cartoonists holding a greet and meet during this year’s Twin Ports Festival of History.
Gawboy’s comic strip, “Wanigan,” set on a fictional reservation in northern Minnesota, was published in The Ely Miner from 1978-1980…
Monroe created the offbeat and on-point comic strip “Violet Days” for more than two decades. It ran in the News Tribune and in the city’s Ripsaw newspaper…
Which one never missed a deadline? Which of their comic strips were censored and never made it into public view? Who caused more local controversy? Who is still hiding from the Forest Service?
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