At 93 Sy Barry, artist of The Phantom comic strip from 1961 to 1994 and a comic book artist for 16 years leading into that assignment, remains active as an art instructor. Every Monday afternoon, laughs and wise-cracks come from the art room at Stone Hill at Andover, a retirement facility on Elm Street. A […]
Drew Litton, sports cartoonist for The Colorado Sun and 9News (KUSA, Denver), recently got a segment on his television station celebrating “a nearly 40 year career.” That marks when he joined The Rocky Mountain News in 1982. But Drew began his newspaper career four years before that with The El Paso Times as copy boy/photographer/editorial […]
New Yorker cartoonist Hilary Fitgerald Campbell is far too young to have a full-blown biography, so this Press Democrat profile will suffice. When Campbell was a kid, a sketch of Charles Schulz’s Snoopy hung in the hallway of her Sonoma home, a gift from Schulz to her mother. Campbell’s grandfather, the late Daniel Vaughan, […]
Hispanic Heritage Month wrapped up a few days ago, but it’s never too late to acknowledge the immense contributions that Mexican and Mexican-American artists have made to the development of American animation. When you start diving into American animation history, it’s actually surprising at first to discover the impact that artists of Mexican descent have […]
Joe Dator puts a book together. © Joe Dator What do you wish you had known before making a book? I wish I’d known even one single thing about book publishing. It was a massive learning experience, and I started from scratch. For one thing, I found out that what goes in the book […]
Canada Post’s week of honoring editorial cartoonists continues with Bruce MacKinnon. MacKinnon’s first cartoon was published by the local weekly, The Casket, in his hometown of Antigonish, N.S., when he was 14. He studied fine arts at Mount Allison University and graphic design at the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design – paying his […]
photo: Anna Watts for The Washington Post The tiniest line and the big picture. That is her purview since becoming only the fourth cartoon editor in the magazine’s near-century-long history — and the first woman to ascend to that lofty title — after succeeding Bob Mankoff four years ago. [Emma] Allen, 33, is shaking up […]
Legendary Gets Hollywood Rights to Heathcliff © Creators Syndicate Move over Garfield, there’s a new cat in town. Or rather, the previous cat is back and looking to score the spotlight. Legendary has picked up the feature and TV rights to Heathcliff, the comic strip featuring the cocky and street-smart cat about town, Heathcliff. The […]
If you know me, you know I’m a huge fan of Chester Gould, and I have a number of Dick Tracy originals hanging on my wall. They bring inspiration and a smile to me every day. For my upcoming birthday, my son [Aaron Smith] created a ‘DETECTIVE GRAYSMITH’ comicstrip in the same Dick Tracy style! […]
Once upon a time there was a lonely rich boy whose mother insisted on dragging him away from home to strange lands. Deprived of friends his own age and missing his father, the boy found solace in becoming a collector of all sorts of odds and ends, of coins and stamps, of beer steins and […]
[I]f you were looking for a name for a cartoonist, you couldn’t do much better than Scrawls. And that’s exactly how Sam C. Rawls signed his editorial cartoons and his comic strip—he was one of those rara avis who does both— and every syllable is exactly the truth, no fictional make-believe in sight. But […]
Young Liza had succeeded in fulfilling a lifelong dream. In 1979 Liza Donnelly joined three other women as the female force of New Yorker cartoonists; there were more than ten times that many male cartoonists contributing to the magazine then. Not long before that she was made aware that she was a “woman cartoonist,” prior […]
“My 50,000 comics would be at least 50 novels and 60 TV episodes worth of dialogue,” declares the syndicated illustrator whose Mr. Boffo and Willy ‘n Ethel appear in newspapers throughout the U.S. Martin was already declared the most prolific published cartoonist ever in 2001 by the publishers of The Guinness Book of World Records, so he […]
Johnny Sampson began his comics career with a sideways tribute to Al Jaffee. In Tru-ly MAD-ly, the Chicago illustrator gets an assignment in 2013 from the editors of Pitchfork’s new magazine, The Pitchfork Review, to duplicate MAD‘s secret weapon: the Fold-In, an intricately designed transformer painting invented by MAD‘s scientist of cartooning, Al Jaffee. Like […]
Antonio vs. Fidel and Spy vs. Spy But he was always careful that neither spy ever defeated the other because of the limits placed on his work by Mad, according to his daughter Marta Pizarro, who accompanied Prohías to his first interview with the magazine as an interpreter because he did not speak English. The […]